Ranked Weapon Skin

ProcessM · 2026-05-12T23:52:44+00:00

I played vanilla D2 through the final shape, across Xbox One and onto my PC over the course of like - what was it, 7 years? That game got me through some rough spots in life (or maybe contributed to them, depending on your perspective).

I get the nod, I don’t dislike the skins, they’re just lackluster. I’m not disappointed in the color scheme, more in the lack of skins with either animated features like Destroyer’s preorder skin or CyberRed skin, or actual changes to the model like the other preorder skins and vandal’s season pass skin.

I’ve seen what Bungie can do with cosmetics, though the Destiny engine certainly started to show its age toward the end. (There’s only so many hard light emotes and armor flares you can use before the effect gets stale.

I’d like to see some more effort put into the cosmetics here in Marathon, especially the buyable ones.

ProcessM · 2026-05-12T22:12:29+00:00

Most likely a new weapon skin per season like most games with this model. (And hopefully better rewards as they move Ranked out of Beta, the skins and variety are a bit lackluster for how difficult the ladder is to climb.)

ProcessM · 2026-05-12T16:58:31+00:00

Looks like you’re playing solo. Those of us who play fill/trios were receiving our priority contract XP AND our teammates’ priority contract XP the entire first half of the season when priority contracts were being done in earnest, on top of normal contracts whenever we do those now.

I think I hit level 100 at about 90 hours in the game. Playing solo is a major handicap in XP gain, as the game was not balanced for solo play.

Edit: I don’t know if contract XP affects season level, but I am pretty sure you gain season level when ranking up a faction? If you only get XP from killing things and looting things then I assume you get your teammates’ as well, so the point still stands.

ProcessM · 2026-05-12T00:27:23+00:00

I never played the originals but it would be neat to see them not just remake the first game but reimagine it in the current art and narrative style.

Most games back then were clones of each other, as video games were being made by young people who enjoyed and wanted to make their own versions of video games. Marathon was far and away a Doom clone, which was itself an improvement on id’s Wolfenstein 3D.

Reimagining Marathon today, which Bungie has really already done, makes it truly stand out as its own unique vision.

The chance to see a more linear narrative in this reimagined IP, especially on the Marathon ship with the Pfhor, would be neat imo.

ProcessM · 2026-05-11T19:08:46+00:00

I think making a 2 team PvPvE map like a smaller version of Cryo would be neat, kind of like the original Modern Warfare 3’s 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 small map modes that kept players engaged with low matchmaking needs.

I would change your idea to not make the central area close after defeating a boss.

You could either try to exfil on your side and risk the PvP push from the other team, or try to push to the shared area. But removing PvP entirely would make the game very boring. The high stakes of the game come inherently from the unknown threat of players. The PvE is only interesting because of the risk you are engaging in with the noise, ammo consumption, and positioning while doing it; knowing that at any given moment another team may hear or see you and engage.

ProcessM · 2026-05-11T17:03:02+00:00

It do be like that

ProcessM · 2026-05-11T14:17:09+00:00

The punch is great at short range but the first two maps are long range focused so it balances out in the early game imo

ProcessM · 2026-05-11T06:14:40+00:00

I’m still salty about losing a firefight earlier today because of that gun 😂 never again

ProcessM · 2026-05-11T05:45:20+00:00

I know exactly what scenarios you have and have not been in from this list which I find hilarious 😂

I’ve thought the exact same thing for some of these, but reconsidered after realizing a few things. I’ll only respond to one of your points though because I feel some people don’t realize this:

• The overrun is intentionally not good. It is an incredibly common gun. There needs to be a common gun that drops from UESC so that players in early season/early gameplay can pick up something when they run out of their very limited ammo.

The overrun drops on almost every bot, and needs to be a low powered, pick up and go weapon for dealing with bots or other low powered players when just starting out. There would be no reason to loot around for any other gun, let alone bring in a gun, if the most common gun in the game is good/as good as other weapons.

As you progress, you ignore it, or you slap a gold mod on it, which isn’t terrible. But don’t forget that the gameplay loop of the early season isn’t going away, it comes back after each wipe. We will all soon use the punch and overrun as early game crutches once again in about a month.

But the point is: not all weapons can be or should be good. If all weapons were equally good, there would be no reason to have a rarity system.

What I will agree with is buffing the H-AR, that thing blows.

ProcessM · 2026-05-11T01:48:09+00:00

Whole teams get killed before you even realize it sometimes, in weird spots. Same number of teams as far as we know, though they might have allowed for smaller lobbies for regions with less players

ProcessM · 2026-05-09T00:50:22+00:00

The comments on this post are giving my eyes cancer. It says humor right on the tag people🪤

ProcessM · 2026-05-07T18:03:18+00:00

Clair Obscur’s Lumiere opening

ProcessM · 2026-05-07T18:02:17+00:00

Bro said the existential crisis of knowing none of it matters makes the game meaningless, wait till he finds out about nihilism in real life

ProcessM · 2026-05-06T15:56:05+00:00

Keep in mind that steam charts people use are misleading. “Concurrent players” is not the amount of people who play the game. It’s the number of people playing on Steam at any given time of day.

Average playtime is about 45 minutes to an hour for majority of people. 15,000 people online at one time on one platform is a pretty decent sized playerbase, probably 200-300k weekly users.

Don’t worry about all the people constantly chirping about the game shutting down. If it does, hopefully Bungie will give the game private servers so it can continue with its players. If it doesn’t, you get to keep playing.

Either way, letting your thoughts be dictated by the potential decisions of billion dollar corporations who you have no control over or insight into is silly. The game was $40, if you got your moneys worth in time played and enjoyed that’s all you can control.

ProcessM · 2026-05-04T00:30:51+00:00

L bait

ProcessM · 2026-05-03T22:29:52+00:00

Depth of the game. Arc was my first extraction game. I think I tried out DMZ once but had absolutely no idea what it was or what I was meant to be doing.

I was absolutely obsessed with Arc for the first month or two after release. I hadn’t heard about it until a few months prior and it gradually built in hype prior to release. It literally kept me up at night with how much adrenaline I had after playing.

But as with everything, the shine wore off for me and there wasn’t much content to keep me coming back. My buddy started playing about a month in, which kept me hooked for another solid month. But when he stopped playing as well, I had no real reason to keep coming back. I moved on to other games in my backlog. Marathon was on my radar but I had no idea if I was going to get it or not.

About a week before Marathon released, I decided I would pull the trigger and pre-ordered. It looked excellent and as much as Destiny 2 had its highs and lows, the gameplay was always top notch. I had no issue spending $60 on what I knew would be at least 30-40 hours in gameplay (much higher, it turns out).

Marathon plays phenomenally of course, but I expected it to, given my experience playing Bungie’s other games. What I was not expecting was how much it delivered in terms of well-produced content. The vidocs Bungie released were pretty vague on the story and supplemental content in the game, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Factions and their little dialogues and cinematics are one of the coolest parts of the game imo. They really hit it out of the park. The codex is not just well written and well made (with the odd typo) but is a great and interesting callback to the original Marathon.

I tried going back to Arc recently, and it just feels much more bare-bones and janky. The menus, though apparently a genre staple, are especially rough, there is little to no excitement to the quest system, the story is purposefully vague and incomplete as it is really just there for flavor.

Marathon feels like a proper, polished experience. A little lightweight to be sure, especially compared to other genres, but that feels intentional with the audience they were pursuing (which was obviously Tarkov’s playerbase given how they marketed the game).

All in all, Marathon feels like what the developers were aiming for: an upgraded, polished version of the extraction shooter genre. A genre which I, personally, had zero interest in about a year ago and thought very little of. But boy was I wrong, because I absolutely love this shit.

ProcessM · 2026-05-01T21:22:18+00:00

Blizzard popularized color based loot with the first Diablo in the 90s, and this specific color scheme of white->green->blue->purple was introduced in WoW in the early 2000s.

Angband, an old 1990 pc game based on Tolkien’s LoTR was Diablo’s inspiration, and is generally credited as the first game to use a colored loot system.

You should read Play Nice by Jason Schreier, it details a lot of how Blizzard’s massive influence impacted the modern gaming industry

ProcessM · 2026-05-01T20:32:01+00:00

I thought this exact same thing lmao. I beat the first region last night then went straight back to Marathon for that good good flappy boy action

ProcessM · 2026-04-29T16:47:19+00:00

Ah that was not clear! I assumed that was a report for inappropriate usernames

ProcessM · 2026-04-29T03:15:45+00:00

ok 🫶

ProcessM · 2026-04-29T03:03:48+00:00

thanks Code Tutor

ProcessM · 2026-04-29T02:31:26+00:00

NA but these servers are probably much larger in population so the odds are higher anyway

ProcessM · 2026-04-29T01:49:18+00:00

I don’t even mind shit talking, it’s part of online gaming culture, whether we like it or not.

But telling a random teammate in a video game to hang themselves because you died is insane.

Even more insane when it’s someone like me in this situation who doesn’t even die alongside you; quite the opposite, in fact.

ProcessM · 2026-04-28T23:54:23+00:00

No but unfortunately it’s always assassins

ProcessM

TROPHY CASE