There should have been two big catches arrows launch in the last quarter of this year. One of them Arc Raiderswhich is actually coming out later this month. Another Marathonwhat, well, You know. Interestingly, however, both games were tested earlier this year, giving the Arc Raiders developers an opportunity to learn something from Marathon.
Talking to PC gamerArc Raiders design director Virgil Watkins said that “it was very coincidental that they did the test around the same time as us. As far as I know, I don't think any of us knew this was coming. It was a great A/B test for us because obviously they were making decisions that we weren't making and vice versa. So we could kind of compare and contrast how some of these things shook out.”
In particular, Watkins notes how the Arc Raiders team was able to gauge how people responded to the pair of shooters' different takes on the genre. “[It] it was quite interesting to see what players thought about these certain things, or what worked in their context and what didn't, and what might have worked in ours,” he explained.
It's worth noting that Watkins said he didn't get into the game or anything like that, only a select few were able to play Marathon. Bungie's shooter is obviously in murky waters at the moment, but Watkins is curious to see what comes of it, saying: “[found] the art style is very memorable… Personally, I'm curious to see how it ends. I hope to see more of this in the future.”
Arc Raiders conducted the final playtest on weekends and it seems to have gone quite well, so I'm curious myself to see if the full version can bring extraction shooters out of their deep niche. This is a marathon I'm going to take another test this weekbut this one is under an NDA, so don't necessarily expect to hear anything about it (even though you can probably bet someone would break said NDA for Reddit karma or whatever else kids are into these days).
