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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

Reactionary panic purchase by Sony when MS acquired Activision and looks like they're well on their way to destroying the company.

Good job Sony.

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I don't think Sony should get blame on this, Bungie was already well on their way to mediocrity. They had a great IP, great game mechanics but they've been riding the Destiny train for way too long with mediocre expansions (except for Witch Queen). There are also too many looter shooters competing for people's time, live service as a model is a steady revenue stream but the good times don't last forever. It's time for something fresh and new, even if it's not live service, just give players anything.

I assume they care most about the IP and less about the studio?

What IP? Marathon that was only just announced? Destiny seems to be winding down.

The new Marathon game seems to be very loosely related to the originals and not even having a single player experience.

Pretty much only Mac users played the original.

I think it would have been better if they gave the game a different name. To me it feels a bit like a “betrayal” of the original game and with very little, if any, benefit.

Halo is in many ways an extension of the Marathon lore but with a different plot. Since Halo is a Microsoft IP Sony probably saw this as a good way to have their own Halo.

I think Bungie eventually confirmed that the two aren't in the same universe, but in the early days it seems like that was pretty up in the air. Prior to the announcement of Halo, a prominent Marathon fan site started receiving emails from cortana@bungie.org - https://marathon.bungie.org/story/cortana.html . The sender appeared to be a rampant AI who was dropping all kinds of cryptic tidbits that linked her to Marathon. For example Cortana and the AI antagonist of Marathon are named after swords wielded by Charlemagne's paladins in the 12th century, and they appear to be aware of this and of each other... at one point in Marathon 2 Durandal asserts that he's got a history with Charlemagne and calls him a fruitcake..!

Cortana later repeats some of the lines from those emails in Halo 3, and Marathon references are all over the place in the first few games.

Bungie was in a league of their own back in the day with all the cryptic references and teasers and connections. At one point they released a timeline for the Marathon universe, and the point in time when Halo takes place is labeled with "Nothing important happened here."

You can play the original Marathon(s) on Mac, Windows, and Linux now thanks to Aleph One [0]. There's also new scenarios for the engine still being released, like Apotheosis X which came out last year [1].

[0] https://alephone.lhowon.org/ [1] https://www.moddb.com/mods/apotheosis-x

I heard the opposite. They care more about the studio’s live service expertise than the Destiny IP.

That was the stated reason for the acquisition, and why they put so much money towards retention bonuses.

Unfortunately, since Sony is scaling back their live service ambitions, seems like maybe this wasn't the best move. Then again, this article makes the situation sound pretty dire, and it isn't like those things would be different had the acquisition not happened...

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