Fortnite oversaw the transition of Battle Royale from game to genre, and I think ARC Raiders performed the same trick for Extraction - and in a very similar way. Tarkov and PUBG are both loping, all fours, half-clad man beasts with their dicks out in a public park. Their own skin feels too tight, somehow; they're scratching themselves on the rough bark of trees just to get a moment of release. Fortnite and ARC Raiders are, by way of comparison, videogames.

If Marathon had released when it was intended to, and I don't think this is up for debate, it would have been pulverized by ARC Raiders. These two games would have been brutally Sorted by the community, by the algorithm, everything. We would have an Answer and there would be a Loser. I'm not sure what kind of conversation Bungie had to have with management - a force that has spent the last year or so selling the company for parts - but the dialogue around the beta and the hot brand of Concord still in their memory must have provided a very slight, very rare window of opportunity. I even preordered it, not something I typically do, but just to formally lodge in their system the only kind of prayer the Algo understands.

It now has an opportunity to be Marathon - whatever that actually is - in a time where those who raid ARCs are wondering how bad they really want to throw all their shit away on an another Expedition.

But yeah, there is indeed, a sort of miasma around… shit man, I think the entire superstructure that observes and interprets games is concussed, but I thought that in ninety-eight. It's not clear to me where or how the purity edicts are being distributed buuuuut I'm missing them and may need to create a custom rule in Gmail. And these agents of luminous purity are so annoying that they have manufactured the only force more annoying than they are. I've never been more pleased to be a culturally inert relic.

(CW)TB out.