The Besties - Marathon Is Both a Miracle and a Monster

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Frushtick and Griffin were Destiny dudes, and yet it's Plante who has fallen in love with Bungie's new extraction shooter. What's so appealing about Marathon? Is the extraction genre's difficulty a dealbreaker? Who is this game even for? Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Could have used a dinklage. Could have used a floating dinklage that accompanied me all about marathon. Oh, yeah. And would sort of, you know, quit drop cracks, bring him back to life if I died. Do you understand how deep into the destiny hole you would need to be to know that Peter Dinklage at one point but no longer voiced the ghost that followed you around in destiny? I actually downloaded an update where I downloaded an update to fix it because they did swap him out with Nolan North in 2050.

But then I found an update online. Did you pay Peter Dinkwidge a cameo? So yes, it was a very, very complicated. So basically what I had to do, every time Bunchy released a new expansion, I would transcribe all of the ghost dialogue and then I would buy many Dinklage Camados. Yeah, it's like 60 or 70,

per expansion. Yeah. Some of them is a little bit less verbose than others. But yeah, I think it would be better, I think it would be a better game

if there was a, there's a classic summons little healing bots. All I'm saying is just have Dinklidge say like, no problem. I'll get in there and heal them up,

good boss. Yeah. Stuff like that, like I think would... And you could probably do like the Pokemon anime thing where they just keep reusing the same animation.

You could probably slot in some of those lines. Oh, for sure. For sure. problem yeah i could probably take lines from his other movies that sound like like maybe there's a movie where he's a doctor and he's like i'll heal him up and you can put that on the healing robot but i think a dinklage would have bumped this up to a 10 for me that's the dream about the camos because i i hate to like dwell on it yeah did it get annoying that every line was like i think

you should heal up thank you for another cameo griffin i look well no sometimes if it was a short one like that, you can trick him into saying, he won't just do it. You do have to trick him. And it'll be stuff like, hey, it's my niece's seventh, uh, graduate, uh, anniversary of her wedding. And it would really make her day if you would say drone incoming, prepare to, prepare to strike. Like, and then he doesn't ever fall for it. Because I use a fake name every time. Yeah. And you did change the black pyramid to be called cameo. So you could kind of work it in that way too. Yeah. Every time that was like, I got him That one was three different cameos because I had to get the in one. And then like black was like a different one.

And then pyramid, that pyramid was tricky, how to say it into, but I did manage to get that one in there. Thank God. Doing a thing about the food pyramid for my nephew. He has really complicated views about that. So we probably shouldn't be going any further. Yeah, no.

But Dinklage would have helped. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Time's Plant and I took a glass. of water at the wrong time. I saw you take down a hearty gulp and I still did. He's so used to having that Justin beat. Yeah, for sure.

That's my water beat. Yeah. You're going to take it again, Chris? No, it's good. No, no, no, no. I'm really happy with him. Just say your name. My name is most fresh week.

I know it was the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest and home interactive intergamement. Justin's recovery continues. He is not. This is maybe the worst possible game for him to try to play. It's been slow going. Twitch-based, intense, very demanding shooter.

Very punishing, very time-consuming. There's a lot of heats that this thing was bringing that that juice was not able to sort of... If anything, it was kind of mean of us, but I think we would put that on Chris Plant, who was the one that suggests that we play this game. So rather than, you know, the three of us speak enthusiastically about this cyberpunk extraction shooter, while one of us just kind of... It waits for the bits of me over. We're going to be rocking trio mode, just like in Marathon.

Chris, what the heck is Marathon, dude? Marathon's latest first-person shooter from Bungy, the people who brought you Halo and Destiny and Destiny too. But this time, they are going after a new multiplayer trend. They're going after the extraction shooter where you land on a terrifying terrain of enemies and other players. You try to collect lots of good loot, complete a little mission or two, and you think you. get the hell out of there without dying. If you don't care about extraction shooters, and I don't, there's some really wild choices that this game makes

that I think are interesting to talk about, and we will get all up into that and more after this short break. Can I try and set this scene for, like, the vibe before Marathons release? And it's been out for, what, a few weeks now? A couple weeks, so I was playing Destiny 2 pretty actively when they announced that they were working on Marathon. This was already when the, I don't know, vibe around bungee in general had started to get a little bit weird just because there'd been some like higher up changes at Destiny 2 and some really, really, really shitty decisions made for that game. I remember being an honest during a sort of not great period.

And so there was already kind of that vibe hanging around. I think people were not so stoked about Marathon as a property. I mean, I think people were, had no opinions. about marathon because it had been dormant for 30 years. It had been dormant for a very long time. And then when the news came out that it was an extraction shooter, I feel like that. That was also a little bit tough. And then there was the thing where it turned out that some of the art from the game

had been plagiarized. And so like there's just been kind of a lot of, I have been very hesitant to check this game out despite my thousands of hours I have logged across Destiny 1 and 2 because of that stuff. And I don't know, I think it's another object lesson that, like, a reputation should maybe not proceed a game when you are in the position of talking about games professionally. Because it has surprised me that I've been having some fun with Marathon. I was totally ready to fully skip it because of a lot of the things you mentioned and emphasis on me not really liking the genre. The fact that Chris Plant of all people, the last person I would.

ever think... Topsy-turve. To be into an extraction shooter, and we talked about it last week, so obviously we know we were all surprised about that. But the fact that he was into it genuinely was the most peaking of my interest for this game.

That is what got me to be like, okay, I've got to see where Chris Plant's brain is for this to be clicking for him so hard. Could we do, Chris, could you set up sort of what the extraction shooter model is before you kind of get into what work about this for you. I think we all have sort of

what I thought it was and then what I think it is now after falling in love this game. I thought an extraction shooter was collect lots of loot and then lose lots of loot and therefore it's a waste of time

that you go into a really terrifying map full of really hardcore NPCs and also other players who are absolutely ruthless and you try to find rare guns that you can then use in another round where you will die, and then they will steal those guns,

and suddenly you're back to where you started. And that didn't sound super fun. And for what it's worth, there are those games. Like extraction shooters like what you described do definitely exist. In fact, I would say there's kind of the norm in a lot of ways. Yeah, for sure. What I read this game as is closer to a game with a campaign

that takes place inside of, what I just described. So before you go into any mission with your buds or solo, you can select a variety of missions for different corporate leaders. And it might be as simple as like break 20 windows or it might be more complicated, like a four point process where you need to go back and forth across the map, loading different, you know, like computer terminals, triggering various enemy things. These are not complex.

Is one of the missions really break 20 windows? because that's very funny. Yeah, one of the onboarding missions for one of the factions is like, everything you need to know about us is where bad boys go break 20 Tosetti4 windows. It's like, holy shit, man. Why is this your whole deal?

So when you go in and you complete those missions, you do not have to exaltrate to have completed that mission. So right away, the most hardcore thing about it is gone, which is go in, you can do the mission. And then if you die, that's terrible. If you happen to get out with lots of cool weapons that will help you in your next mission, that's great.

That's the real gravy. And you can do that over and over and over again. What is interesting about the missions is they start to establish what the meta is and why people are doing what they're doing. So another, the bad boys of Marathon, have a mission that's like, you need to go and not just down 10 people, but you need to execute them on the ground. Which is a rough move to do because it immediately puts you in the fire of like whoever they were with, right? Like it's probably going to get you killed trying to show off doing that. But once you do that, you then know the next time you get executed, ah, they were probably, they're probably just getting their campaign. You know, I'm pretty happy for them.

And it completely changes your mindset about the kind of hostile behavior that you're going up against. There is this equalizing that you start to feel in the game. of I get it. We're all here to get our job done. Yeah. So I would say like that's the top level. We could talk for the whole episode, just about that. That is a, that is a, that is a core pillar of the extraction shooter model that this game kind of just handles with vibes, right?

Two things are true simultaneously. One would turn me off of this game and did. I fucking hated my first couple hours with this game. And I haven't had time to play it. I've played like maybe five hours because I'll talk about this later. Tough to fit into the to the routine. But like I have not had a single encounter with another player that did not begin and end with one of us shooting and killing each other. Like I have not in Arc Raiders that I've played a little bit of.

You always have that moment when you roll up on someone like, hey, I'm chill. In this game there's like there is a dedicated hey I'm chill button that you could do. You could just like friendly, friendly. But like it's never, they just fucking drop you because the time to kill is in. insanely short, so why not? And two, it just kind of seems to be the weird ingrained behavior in this community where there is no doubt. You are going to shoot and you're

going to kill people. There's a class that is basically just a kind of hunter of other classes, which is very interesting. But what makes that not so bad is that the game gives you so many ways to soften the blow of that. There are sponsored loadouts that you can get for free that will just like fill you up with some basic shit and you You can go out there and if you die, it's like, eh, whatever. If you live, usually you'll get a reward from that sponsor. So that's great.

There's a whole class that you don't equip loadouts at all. So you're not going in and losing a bunch of stuff. That class is just kind of about going in there solo, picking up what you can and getting out of there. So like this hang up I have in my mind of like too stressful, I don't want to work to get a bunch of shit and then lose it or, you know, I don't want to go down on the map and find something dope and then get killed. Like, the game kind of has an answer for all of that.

stuff and I don't know it is what has made me want to keep playing the game it is the single most sort of like defining feature of the game so far to me where where I've kind of run I don't know how to approach this necessarily because I don't want to come off as negative because there are certainly no no no fresh fresh go go full-throated on this you I want to hear like your real opinion because fresh this game also has huge problems that I do want to get into but the game is unquestionably, I've played a lot for this podcast and in general played a lot of video games, maybe top five worst onboarding games I've ever played in my life. Like horrible, indiscernible onboarding where the UI makes no sense.

You don't know where you need to look for your inventory or where quests are or where assignments are or what these people are that are talking to you and why they're talking to you. It requires a good, I would say, two hours of like someone, in this case, Chris Plant, walking you through each and every screen and where you should be looking and what icons mean and which things to pick up and what not to pick up. And if you don't have that, I guess you could probably watch a YouTube video for an hour. But Christ, even the fact that like Bungy made Destiny and spent a long-ass time getting the onboarding of destiny

in a really good place. Came up with like six different onboarding solutions. They kept trying to nail it and here it feels like they did not even try. And in its place is genuinely one of the most stunning games to look at and also one of the most interesting UIs to look at, but from a actual

like navigating at standpoint, horrendous, like really bad. There's a question of like, what's the loop of the game? The loop of the game is obviously, like an extraction shooter, okay, I go down, I pick stuff up. The question of like, what do I prioritize picking up? Because of my inventory space is like super duper low. Okay, well, okay, I got out. I got a bunch of stuff. What do I do? Like, what do I do with this? There's a, there's an upgrade screen, but I can't really get, oh, I need 12 unstable biomass. Jesus Christ. Like, that stuff is so,

there is no visible carrot for most of that sort of early period of the game. And so you're just kind of playing because it's the guns feel good. I would actually say there are, there's a carrot and then there's about 30 other carrots and you're in the middle of them and you're like, which fucking carrot should I be. While you're getting shot out by robots. I'll point to an example that I think would have been better,

which is another extraction shooter. The game is Hell Divers 2. Hell Divers 2 has three upgrade resources. Common, rare, ultra rare, whatever the fuck it was called. And this game, seemingly has 30 and there's only one resource that you really want early in the game and it's unstable diodes I want to say I don't know what they're called but you're drowning in other things

and if the game was just kind enough to like throw you a bone and like highlight the things that you need for an upgrade for example like those are the sorts of things that I think would make the onboarding a lot I yes I I have theories about all of this one I had a very simple onboarding experience, but I increasingly think it was rare. I think it was like I just was playing with the right people and it all felt like natural and it was definitely people giving me the onboarding experience and not the game itself. The thing that you're talking about fresh with hell divers where it's like, well, you have these three things and how much simpler that is. I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to solve for the fact that everybody is splitting the same

loot. So with you not having a ton of inventory and there being a wide variety of resources, the odds that you need the same thing as your other players need at any given point are lower. And therefore, like, you're going to grab these things out of the bin. They're going to grab those things. It's going to all like equal out. The other thing, and I'm not saying this is a defense. I'm just saying like this is a sign that they put in the game. They, for the thing of like, what items do I need. You can go into the upgrade chart and then manually pick an item and then mark it, and then it will show up in the game when you go there and it will even tell you which areas of the game have that material. Would have been cool for the game to tell me that, dude,

because I've, the weird thing is the game does at a certain point tell it you in big print, like it comes up as like a whole screen that you have to pop out of. And even when it tells you it, it doesn't really tell you how it works. So it's like, hey, you should probably go and mark your gear. And it's like, what does that mean? Yeah. Tell me more. I struggled a lot with the loot economy of this game.

I still feel like I'm just playing it because it's kind of fun. I have gotten good enough now that like when I'm in a team of three and I roll up on another team of three runners, like, I actually feel pretty good about my chances. I can hang in there. I had a game with seven runner eliminations last night. I felt pretty fucking good about that. And that's fun for me. I don't feel like I am getting cooler guns or attachments that are making those guns,

like noticeably more particularly stronger. I'm not unlocking new, like, abilities or anything like that. I guess it's the perks that you're working for with the... It's the perks, right? And the perks are extremely helpful, and they go across all of the characters. It'll be like more inventory space. More inventory space. Your heat, which is like the way that...

that the game keeps you from just sprinting the whole time. That is improved. There's upgrades that just improve the Rook, which is the solo only, go into a middle of a match class, disguise yourself as a robot MPC, and try to fucking murk other players and get out with the much more limited time limit that you have.

That's how the Rook class works, and it's fucking cool. And sometimes the only thing I can play because I will set aside 30 minutes to play this game to knock out a match, which is 30 minutes, and then I'll get my clock clean. in 10 minutes in and be like, well, I don't have time for another full match. It's rook time.

Time to get in there and just get nasty. But those upgrades are the most meaningful thing, I think, that I am sort of chasing down. It is a far cry from there's this exotic I'm trying to get, or I'm trying to, like, get enough resources to unlock this class feature. Or I think there are class cores that is like a type of equipment that do kind of modify the, what is there, seven different classes that you can equip. But like, I'm saying like, I've been playing this game. I've played maybe a dozen matches. I've gotten okay at it. I do not feel like I am working towards anything super exciting or that I have found

anything where I've been like, oh, goddamn, yeah, I'm going to use this gun until I inevitably am killed and someone takes it from me. Maybe that is a, I don't do a lot of ranked play. Maybe if I'm, like, moved up the ladder a bit, I do think the loot drops in general are more kind of desirable. But like, I don't know. It doesn't excite me, which also means if I die and I lose shit, it's like, Yeah.

I didn't really give a shit. If I lost my unstable biomass, that's a pain in the ass because I'm trying to get my heat reduction perk upgraded. But like, I don't know. I don't know if that gets better, Chris. You have played more than me. So maybe you are finding exciting guns and shit like that. The answer to that is not exciting. It's like it will help you survive more.

So on top of being able to upgrade these like perks, these permanent buffs, you also unlock the ability to buy items. you also unlock the ability to buy items that are significantly better. So you can buy a shield. Do you start with the lowest possible shield in this game to the point that it's barely even there and barely effective? And you can start every time you drop by being able to buy a much, much, much better shield for relatively cheap. Those are the kind of... I don't know about relatively cheap, man. I feel like I'm always dying for credits.

I mean, as you get on, you will be finding better weapons, which you can cash out for, like, more money. But that it's not a sexy, you know, growth trajectory, right? It's like, congrats. You get to live a little bit longer. I agree with you. I am largely playing it just because it's fun. Like, I am treating this, fresh, I think I talked to you about this, like a single player roguelike that happened. to be trapped inside of an extraction shooter universe.

Yeah. I have these goals that I am doing as if it were a single pair campaign, and I am largely avoiding other human players unless I know I have the jump on them. And because the time to kill is so fast in this game, if you get the jump on somebody, you're going to knock them down. That's it. Which I love because I could not stand playing a game like Halo or even Destiny, where if I got the jump on somebody, often they would just kill me,

because I had not grinded enough hours to, like, have the weapons that I needed to bring them down as fast. I mean, the time to kill was just much longer. Right. Yeah. But as a result, that means that it is not always about skill. It is about who has the best weapon. And it is. It also lends itself to a general sense of paranoia that you will have the whole time that you play this game,

especially when you make your way to an extraction point, which you have to activate, wait about a minute. And then it will turn, it will light up. and then you can step near it and you have to stay near it for 10 seconds before you can extract. And half the time, there is somebody camped out hiding with a shotgun waiting to fucking perforate you

or a thief with their nasty little drone. Oh my God, I found a fucking cool like upgrade. And as I was getting ex-filled out, I heard, and I was like, what the fuck? And I looked out and it was on the ground. And I picked it up again. And I heard, and they yoked it out

and then I teleported away. I was like, no, upgrade, please, no. Can we talk about the classes? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we actually probably played mostly different ones, which should make it for interesting discussion. I think they are interesting, right? Comparing this to a destiny, right,

which was always struggled with how they are balancing between PVE and PVP and people on both sides of the aisle being kind of pissed off most of the time about the decisions that they were making to benefit the other side. This feels entirely kind of PVP balanced. And as a result, there's not these like huge dramatic like you know oh man if you're running warlock you got to do sunsinger

because this is like the meta the powers are like a lot more kind of like subtle right there's a triage class that can drop a little healing drone out and when you heal yourself it heals your allies too and then you have an alt where you shoot out like prods to resuscitate someone instantly or found this out yesterday you use it to absolutely. destroy an enemy. If you're in like a tunnel fight and you launch those down the hallway, you will clear them out.

But it's not like those take a long time to recharge. I think I really... So it's not like you're throwing them down left, right, and center. And that's true of like all the classes. I think that's the biggest difference with destiny is in destiny, what I was used to is like I could use my classability

every eight seconds. And here it's like once a minute, if you're lucky. A lot of that stuff takes a really long time. So you have to be smart about using it. And I have like kind of locked it. So I've been playing as Assassin, which is the like sneaky class. I mostly play it defensively.

I'm sure there's a very aggressive way to play Assassin where you go invisible and like run up on people. Mostly it'll be like, oh, they got the jump on me. I'm going invisible or I'm going to drop smoke or whatever. It's a great oh shit button. It's a great O'Ship button. And it's worked out like a few times where we were extracting and I dropped a smoke bomb and it saved everyone. There was another time where I think I was alone and there was a whole squad that wiped out. plant and the other person.

There's the Benny Hill moment. You were playing last night and all of us got down and I was like, fresh, trash, run, run, run. And he went in assassins, but then just went and hid in a corner like literally five feet away. It was like I took, I took two right turns and then ran to the nearest corner and went invisible and crouched. And the whole squad just walked right past me.

And it was cool. So I like those moments. I think those moments are good. For me, I like the power fantasy of using power. more than I do the gunplay. So it is kind of a bummer that's like, oh, I have to save this invisibility for when I really need it. I understand there's a reason for that from a balance standpoint,

but it's just, you know, it's a little bit of a drag that it just takes a little bit of the fun out. And Plain, I know you talked about Thief in the last episode, which sounds quite fun as well. You mainly play still. Yeah, Thief is where I mean. You have the thing that you were talking about, a drone that you can use to scout spaces

and also use to, like, steal things from other people. Oh, as a scout, it's incredible. I feel like the player base has gotten wise and they hear the sound and immediately start looking for the drone in the sky to shoot. But you can tag people while you are flying around with the little like loot drone and then be able to get the drop on them

which is like pretty incredible. Another fun thing that I'm not sure if they will keep it in or not but you can put a Claymore or a proximity mine on the drone and then you can start chasing people with it which is great. But the other power of, the other two things about the thief is you can put on a visor that shows you the color of gear inside of every box and does it through walls.

I'll tell you what I love most about that is it just lights up where the boxes are because they are a lot like the other non-interactive boxes, which is another, sometimes I play thief just because I get so fucking fed up of like running around a whole station, not finding any containers at all and being like, I know they're here. I know that they're here somewhere. I had a quest yesterday that was find this key card from this commander, pick it up, and then scan the nearby crate. And there were about 30,000 crates within spitting distance.

And eventually, like, plant, I guess, just walked on it. But there's no indication of what that thing is. Yeah, it is really tough to find some of that shit. Yeah. But that thief ability is, like, super duper useful. That sounds very useful. I think this game is doing very interesting things. I don't think this is my game, like, as a genre.

And I think a lot of it is just because of the amount. of focus required. You know, to some extent, we look at multiplayer gaming as like just key hangout time with your friends. Right. And Plant was saying this earlier. Like, it is not a hangout game

because there's so much communication that has to happen for minutes a minute to be successful that there's like no opportunity to actually have a conversation with anyone. That being said, there's a lot of people that like want to wear headphones and like go like fucking tactical hardcore.

And good for that. like that's this game. It's like you can go fucking beast mode with it and be really successful. It's it's it is if I if I were in a different phase of my life, I would play this game probably a lot. Yeah. I find it very enjoyable to play. I actually haven't played it with people I know yet. I've only played in like groups and I've had some actually genuinely pretty great like

teamwork encounters that harken back to like, you know, pick up groups for destiny raids and stuff like that. That's like really great when it happens. I would love to play it with friends. We tried to set up a session three or four different times that I was unable to make work due to mostly kid interruptions. And so it's simply incompatible. I do think it takes a little bit too long to queue into a match unless you're playing as a rook.

Again, why sometimes I'll just dip in as the nasty solo boy because I know there's not going to be a cue. It's going to be a shorter match. It is tough for me to sit down and play a game. for, you know, 30, 40 minutes, however long it takes me to get my load out and shit together before I queue into, like, it's...

Yeah, there's no pausing, obviously, or it's a multi-party game, so you better commit. It's, it's... I've really been enjoying it, and I've been struggling with it because, like, there's stuff about it, I definitely think,

as much sort of early release time as this game had, like, it's weird. Some of the things that haven't been sort of addressed seem kind of weird to me. The fucking aesthetic is through the world. The music and sound that plays just in the lobby is so transportive and fucking weird and like ASMR-E.

You'll be like listening to it and then you'll hear just a weird atonal plucked string that like has nothing to do with anything. You're like, what the fuck is going on? I thought I had like a chrome tab open that like had started playing some like ad. But it was just the game like getting weird. with it. Like, all that stuff is so, so, so cool. It's a swing, man. And, and I'll say, I, for beginners that just want to fuck around a little bit, play rook. I actually, like, now that I've played more of it, just to, like, wet your feet a little bit, you're going to die a lot, but, like, just figure out, like, what the UI elements

are. When you're playing with other people, I think it moves too quickly to, like, really absorb a lot of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It'll also take you a long time to figure out, like, what guns you like. Like, some of them. that, some of that, I mean, it does, the gunplay does feel similar to destiny. It does. Yeah. A little heavier, a little slower maybe, but like the, the feel of the guns, like, they obviously, they know what the fuck they're doing in that category. But, like, I, it took me, not until very, very recently did I start to, like, pick up a gun and kind of know, like, eh, this isn't, like, I want that, like, battle rifle. I want that, like, semi-automatic, uh, rifle or the bully SMG.

Like, I know some of the stuff now. All that stuff just takes a little. while to kind of, I don't know, figure out, figure out what you like and what's worth kind of like chasing what's worth going for. There's definitely homework. It's a homework kind of game. It's going to take a while. And for people that don't have the time or patience, and I'm certainly, to some extent, one of them, you just need to be aware of that going in.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I agree and I disagree with that. And just in terms of, like, people who are considering this, all of this is true. if you're going to play this game competitively. And I wonder if this is where the difference between y'all having so much experience with destiny comes in versus me and your expectations of like how to invest in one of these games. Because for me, almost none of this is true. I've been playing it in like 15 minute burst because that's about how long around is I have not had to do much homework because I'm kind of just doing whatever the quest line says. Well, well, but you also had a personal person.

Guiding. Yeah, for the first maybe like hour and a half. Yeah. And then a few other matches, but then a lot of a solo. I just, I, I, I think all of this is true. If you are going in, you have a lot of experience with multiplayer games. I am just perpetually surprised by like, my experience with this game is so the opposite of the experience that people who love these sorts of games have.

And I think that is strange. Like, it's just, I think it is a reflection of the fact. that I do not play this game so I don't have all the baggage of like how to play these games well I don't think I'm measuring like it was this successful or was this just me like having fun I don't know like what the the rub was there I mean even um we talked about rook but like I never shoot at anybody as a rook like to me rook is just like a scavenge it's a stealth scavenging simulation oh man if you get the drop on someone who thinks you're a normal ass MPC and then you start moving decidedly unlike an MPC and watch their being get freaked.

It's pretty good. I would recommend getting nasty with the rut. I feel like I would love to check in on this game in like a year, right, and see if maybe the economy is a little bit more exciting and, you know, whatever. But so much of this genre and really any kind of like live service game. I guess this kind of like fits into that sort of category is like will it be around in a year? That's what I was going to say. I know that that's like tough to.

I generally don't sort of go for that kind of prognostication of like, oh, who knows? Well, here's what I'll say. I just check. It's sitting at 91 on like the steam activity charts. Well, I'll say they're at 50, around 50,000 peak concurrence per day right now. And I guarantee when Sony bought bungee knowing that they were working. working on their next shooter and it was going to be all online, they were expecting much higher than 50,000 peak concurrence.

That's just on Steam, obviously. It's on consoles as well. But I'm sure they were expecting more of a phenomenon right out of the gate. Yeah, there's three times as many people playing Arc Raider. And that's an older, much more established game. But like, I don't know, man. I'm a little, I'm a bit concerned. Yeah.

Yeah. with the Concord and the what was the more recent one that just got axed? Yeah, I don't know. I think these are all like such different things and I worry about comparing

every online game being compared to this and it being a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The game sold over a million copies. Yeah, it has. The number is going up like, I don't know. I just, I think it's more the investment if someone's making an investment,

whether that's a time investment or whether it's a literal monetary investment and I'm going to buy scans or whatever it is, you would want to know if the game's going to be around any year. Yeah. I also think that a lot of this just comes down to that reputation stuff that we talked about at the top of the bit because the reviews have been pretty positive for this game.

I think it has a very positive score right now on Steam. And I don't know. I was surprised when I saw that because of the just pure disdain that folks had for marathon and everything it kind of represented. So like, I don't know, maybe it's, maybe it's, maybe it is having a slow start. I think the gap that they have to close and that they are running into now is they said, we've done a totally different type of shooter before. We've gone from the competitive multiplayer to the living game MMMO style shooter.

And it felt like our fans followed us. And now we're doing that again. And what they're finding is. is that just like both of y'all, hardcore Destiny 2 players who almost didn't play this game. Maybe wouldn't have played this game if not for this podcast, right? Right. And I think that is pretty common. I think there are a lot of people who play Destiny who see an extraction shooter and they're now even older.

And they're like, wait, so you want me to get even more hardcore as I am older? No, no, thank you. And the recurring thing that you see is like once people play it, they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. I can get into this. But that's a big ask for a lot of your fan base, especially as they get older and, you know,

they're playing fewer and fewer games to say, hey, we need you to try a genre that you're already afraid of. And the first five hours are going to do practically nothing to ease those concerns. Yeah. That's a big ask. Which again is why I get to the like, weirdly,

I think the people who are finding this game first in these early stages are either other extraction shooter people or weirdos like me who have none of that baggage. You're like, I don't fucking know. Like to me this feels- You just like that ghost in the shell shit. You're like all about that life. It just feels infinitely easier, honestly, infinitely easier to parse this game than to parse Destiny 2. Getting everything that you all are describing was absolute hell in Destiny 2. Yeah, sure.

It was miserable every time I played that game with y'all. And it was fun because I had, I was hanging out. with you but like dear god if I had to hear about a new type of like vendor that I needed to go to I was just completely barfed out but yeah but again it's it's all expectations and I think bungee in deciding to do this there has to be this moment now and they're like oh well we we chase this genre and it turns out our core fan base this is not exactly what they were looking for but isn't i mean yeah i feel like a lot of people could have a lot of people could have guessed that i think when they first and out i don't know i want

bungee is such a like the developers that like raw tonnage of talent at at bungee and like institutional knowledge about what makes uh shooters feel good because i do think they make the in my opinion the best feeling shooters in the business good bang that that that stuff is like all there. And I'm like, I think that it has been best executed when the people making it are clearly, like, passionate about the thing that they are,

that they are making. And, uh, I'm sure that there's lots of people who were passionate about, about making this game. And I think that, that some of that does come through. I mean,

the fact that it's such a swing is, I think, it's a huge swing. And I, but at the same time, like, Destiny 3 also would have been a bigger swing. And in my opinion,

probably a safer bet for Sony for, It's still happening, Griffin. Yeah, I mean, when, like, Cooper, get off the pot on that one, man, it's, it's, that, that spring hair isn't his live. I think that's the bigger question about the speculation of Marathon's life that I'm curious about is that Bungee is not that big of a studio. Yeah. It is not big enough to make Destiny 3 and make Marathon at scale at the same time. So, like, they could be in pre-pro for sure, and maybe, or even. an early design, but like,

I think that, that is where the bigger decision has to get made about the future of what Bungy wants to be. What's the studio gonna do? Yeah, for sure. That's tough. That said, the lore fucking rocks. Destiny lore sucks. I'm doing it through fantasy. Destiny lore fucking rules, dude. Do not talk to me about destiny lore being shitty. If you've not watched

a 15 hour long, my name is bif fucking full lore breakdown of sword logic. Don't fucking... I'm glad that they understand. split the nerds between fantasy and hard and sci-fi with their space operas. It's great. I can talk about this game for another hour.

I think it does a lot of really interesting shit, and it interests me more than Arc Raiders. I'm not talking about the quality of the thing, because, like, I don't know, I think Arc Raiders honestly has fewer rough edges about it, but, like, there's so much interesting stuff, even when you get killed, there are times where I'm like, that's interesting. Huh, okay, that's cool. Wow. We haven't even talked about

Nona the silkworm that creates all of your cyber addicts and tells you to go kill yourself. So, so cool. And like, I don't know. This game's been out for not that long and there is all of this kind of

like player etiquette like happening. Yeah. Rooks, like I went on the Discord and there's just like a Rook channel on there where people are just like, here's the fucked up shit I did. Here's the dreams I crushed. Like there's just like a lot of that stuff

has already kind of taken root. And I think that that's also very interesting. I don't know. I don't know if this is the extraction shooter that makes me fall in love with the genre or anything like that. But I am glad I played it and I do want to play some more of it

if we could ever actually get all together in the same room and play. Griffin, to wrap up, I have a rook story that I want to share, which is I thought the rook meta was shifting towards rooks protect other rooks. That were all just vultures out of scabbage. It was for about a day.

It felt like I was coming across some really happy scenarios. And then I got to an ex-fill, loaded an expil. It was guarded by a ton of the MPC robot characters, big, big, beastly robots. And as I am waiting behind a shipping container, I see on the roof maybe like 100 yards away from me a rook with a sniper rifle. And I'm like, what are we doing here? We're both rooks. He knows what I am. I nod at him.

He fires at me. I don't fire back. I come back out. He doesn't fire at me. Okay, we get it. We're not here to fight. Put on my robot mask. I walk over to the X-Fill site.

We're all good. He's there. I'm there. And then I see that gun raise. Sprint to get into the X-Fill site. I get downed. Whatever. You can X-Fill in this game if you're down.

That's all okay. Five, four, three, two. He fucking executes me. Oh. Right before the ex-fill pops. Not even enough time to take your shit. Exactly. Just slimed you just to slime you.

That's fucking brook shit 101, man. It's bad when you like know like, oh man, I'm going to show up on a highlight video. This sucks. Yeah, don't trust a brook basically ever. That's good. That's my number one marathon pro tip. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and we'll answer some reader mail.

Crack that back. Okay, so we've got a bunch of reader mail coming at you Some of this from a couple weeks ago, but we wanted to cover as much as we could because we've missed a couple About Pocopia I think in that episode we mentioned that this was one of the Only maybe the only Pokemon game that does not have Pokemon in the title And as far as we can tell there have been two Thank you readers Brian wrote in to say that Pocken tournament does not have Pokemon title

And Joe wrote in to say that Detective Pikachu you also does not. Ah, yes. Yes, yes, you are right. Case wrote in said, my partner and I have been loving Polkopia this past week. We've both been playing on our own switch twos and I'll usually take the handheld shift, which can be more uncomfortable in a longer play

session. Does anyone have good recommendations for grips while in handheld mode? I've continued to use the Satisfi Zen Grip 2. They make a pretty good grip. What's nice about is you can dock it, which is a rare commodity. I know there are a bunch

of grips out there. I don't know if you guys have used any, but that is the one. No, but I need one. I've been playing so much pocopoeia still, and after a long session in handheld mode, I could feel it, man. I will say the one thing that I've been doing more that I very rarely did with the Switch 1 is I'll put it on a desk and use a pro controller. And because of the larger screen size, it's like actually viable

and enjoyable. So that's another alternative. We have another letter. This one comes from Christian. Since it came up, you might already have answered this, but do I need to play Death Stranding

before playing Death Stranding 2? I'm excited to play the sequel on PC, especially because I've never experienced any Kajima game. What do you guys think?

I mean, it helps, but I never finished Death Stranding 1, nor do I plan to. So, like, it's a big fucking ask. There is ample, like, recap shit.

Like, from the main menu, you can recap the entire plot of the first game. If anything, I think it tells a better story because it's so focused on the actual plot beats of the first game rather than getting lost in the actual game, which... Death Stranding Sickos may disagree. I don't think it's worth it to play the whole game. I prefer Death Stranding 1 as a game.

I think you should play Death Training 2 first. Death Training 2 will teach you how to actually just read the game. And then playing Death Stranding 1 is almost like playing on hard mode because it's... it's way less forgiving. It's also the story is you should play Destrating 2. And also I would say just largely not as much fun because like combat is a mess in Destrining one

whether intentionally or not. Yeah, it's like it depends on what you want from fun. If what you're wanting is the combat and stuff definitely play Destraining too. Destraining one is much more of just a life. It's like a stealth game with deliveries. Yes. Stealth and construction.

I do love it. But yeah, no, two I think is much more approachable. We have another letter. This one comes from Samantha. Definitely recommend Sway the Spire 2's co-op. It works really well. It's super fun and a different way to engage the game. And there are cards and events

specific to multiplayer that change things up to keep it a bit more interesting. My spouse and I've been playing on the couch at night with his Steam link and my Steam deck. That sounds like a good way to do it. That does sound fun. Yeah, no, I'm eager to do it. I still think I'm going to wait.

Maybe I'll save that as like the exciting new thing I know is going to be there when I, you know, out in full access. Yeah, it seems like a really fun, just multiplayer, like, just the idea that you're, like, all sharing strategies and things like that would be pretty interesting. And really no one in the genre has attempted it, so it's cool to see.

This last letter comes from Mike. I'd like to respectfully disagree with Plant on the differences between a Battle Royale and an extraction shooter. We were talking about Marathon again last week. I think Plant was making the point that they're similar. I don't remember your initial point. Anyway, for me, the anxiety of an extraction shooter and a battle royale anxiety are not the same. I think the biggest difference is that you start with all the same equipment in a battle royale,

and RNG is important for your kit, which takes some bit of the pressure off and an extraction shooter. You either go in with good gear and the fear of losing it or bad gear, and you have an automatic disadvantage. This gameplay loop is a lot harder for me, and it seems like a larger risk of wasting time rather than loading up a battle royale. Yeah, I think that gets to what we were talking about earlier about the structure of marathon is if you go into an extraction shooter and you think your experience is about the loot, it's going to be, I think, a pretty miserable experience. Yeah. The loot is the bonus, but the experience is the reward. And what I said last week was that you have a better chance of actually, quote, winning in an extraction shooter of getting out than you do in a battle royale. just numbers wise.

So it depends on what your goal is. But I completely understand this point. If you play these games and your, wherever your brain or your heart tugs you at is the items, is the loot. Who an extraction shooter is going to be a big ask.

Yeah, I still think this game could do more to try and have its cake and eat it to a little bit. But it does also like, I love the sponsored kits. Like I know. that there is a way of playing this game without having to risk the shit that I have and just get in there and get some more experience fighting and find some more materials for my upgrade.

Like, I really do think that this has not been nearly as big of a concern for me as I thought it was going to be. Yeah, I think that's right. Honorable mentions, anyone been watching, play in? Did you see Project Hail Mary, Chris? Did we talk about that last week? Frush, unfortunately,

We only saw the beginning of it, so I won't... I was in a scripting. I won't spoil for anybody else who sees it. I'll just say that it was a very enjoyable movie, and it's so nice to see a big budget blockbuster that's, like, beautiful, as in, like, visually interesting. It has great framing. They use lots of practical effects.

They're bright colors. It doesn't have that kind of sludgy, pasty look that we've come to expect from a lot of big budget stuff that is not called Avatar. and Ryan Kassing, the most beautiful special effect of all. You know, you got to look at that face. In sweaters, and he's just got it all going. I've been watching the, I think it's the fourth season of Shorzy on Hulu.

This is the Canadian non-professional hockey movie show from the creator of Letterkenny. And it's great. It's like weirdly warm-hearted and sweet. mixed with like 8 EDM and like kind of shameless sexuality stuff but I don't know I capital S shameless not like the rest fresh is like judging

no no yeah correct people with their shameless yeah yeah no right they they don't hold back is what I'm saying and that's fine good good on them but yeah it's really well written and lovely characters and I'm always happy to see it come up again

I've been playing a few things, but I think we've talked about all of them. Barry, very, very, very. I got quite into following Russ's recommendation. And like that one a lot. Very self-contained, which I do appreciate from time to time from my incremental games. A lot of Pocopia, just a lot. I finished the main story of it. And now, like, I don't know, I've just sort of been undergoing projects on the palette

town with Henry. We just finished up building a huge nine room apartment complex for all the Evie and Evilutions in Palette Town. It's just like, I don't know, I haven't fucked around building stuff in a game like this since like, you know, early Minecraft days. So I'm very much enjoying that. I played a little Diablo four. You can play as the new Paladin class if you pre-order the next expansion, which I think is out soonish. But I don't know that I've played enough to like really comment all that game has changed. The thing I really do want to talk about on Amazon Prime, the new season of Last One Laughing, UK, this is the truly, truly brilliant kind of concept for a show, a reality show with comedians. And they were not the first to sort of come up with it.

If you're familiar with documentary, the Japanese television program, this is very much the same. They lock 10 comedians in a room for six hours. And if you laugh once, you get a yellow card. If you laugh another time, you get a red card and you are ejected from the competition. And if you watch Taskmaster, you're going to know about 75% of the cast on this season. Sam Campbell is on it. He's a fucking stone cold killer. Bob Mortimer is back from season one, who is pound for pound.

I think the one of the funniest living human beings Diane Morgan who plays Philomena Kunk from Kunk on Earth is on this season Mel It's a murder's row right here

This is nuts It's wild, it's a really, really wild list And from the jump It is just like Absolutely astonishingly funny So many people taking so many heavy swings At each other trying to make each other laugh

and then having to literally stand up to remove themselves physically from like the location where the jokes are taking place before they laugh. Like to me, there is nothing funnier than that. So I think there's only three episodes of it out so far. No episodes are coming on Wednesdays. And I'm waiting with bated breath because it is hysterical. Plant, what have we talked about this week? Oh, we've talked about so much. We talked about Marathon.

We talked about Shoresy. We talked about Last One Laughing, Diablo 4, Pocopia, and Project Hail Mary. That's a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. If you want to hear us talk about more stuff, may I suggest going to patreon.com slash the besties and joining our Patreon. It helps us out a lot. And you also get access to sweet Boko and episodes of the resties and just all kinds.

Bracket battles episode. We have a very good one coming at you. We just did a besties. We just did a Restes on a very cool racing game called Screamer, and then we have bracket battles coming at you first week of April, which is a really fun one. I'm very excited to show. Patreon.com slash the besties again.

Do you want to shout out some members? Oh, yeah, absolutely. We have, sorry, I'm going to butcher this. Sarojia B. I'm sure there's a better way to pronounce that, but I'm going to just go with that. Eric R., Jacob M. and just the letter V. Awesome.

Could be Vandetta. Could be those aliens from the 80s. We don't know. could be um thank you all so much for supporting us and thank you to our dear listeners now for listening to us next week i don't know that we have a game selected i'm actively working on it but it has not been uh fully confirmed so we're going to keep it up in the air it'll be a mystery episode so join us for a mystery game next next week that new legacy of cane game comes out march 31st oh that might be fit we'll see uh we'll figure it out we'll figure it out uh

So join us next week as we play more games and we talk about them to you, for you, with you here on the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Estes!