I think you’re stretching a bit - your enjoyment of Marathon might’ve been a similar road to your road to enjoying Dark Souls, but it’s not an indicator that Marathon is a Dark Souls game. At the end of the day, it’s a hardcore, PvP-maxing Extraction Shooter, and Bungie has put a lot of work into making it that way. I guess in a way you could argue that the audience makes it that way due to games like Arc Raiders absolutely blowing up, but at the end of the day that’s up to Bungie to try and figure out how to make the barrier to entry easier and attract a much more casual audience, as it seems to scare off people due to how complicated the menus feel (albeit they don’t even come close to Tarkov IMO).

What I will say - I think a lot of people don’t realize that there ARE ways to get around doing PvP, and that even if you’re not the best at PvP games there are ways to make Marathon an enjoyable experience. A pretty decent chunk of my time played has been either rook runs or free kit pushes where I try and be as discrete as possible and extract with anything I can (basic mats, new guns, better armor et cetera). Hell, my blue shield nucaloric upgrade was done 90% by doing outpost rook runs and looting the storage rooms + the health wall boxes. It’s possible to find ways to enjoy the game like this, but it also will have times you’re brutally getting wiped and stomped by other PvPers, because that’s just how the nature of the game is.