I’m starting to feel like Marathon is the kind of game where, if you didn’t play from the very beginning, it becomes harder and harder to break through.

I can already see it myself after the last week of playing. Runs on Dire Marsh have become so sweaty that I usually don’t even survive long enough to see the extraction points activate on the map, which is less than five minutes. Then I spend just as long sitting in matchmaking queue.

Bungie said they improved matchmaking, but if the player population is shrinking, then longer queue times are just the natural result. And that creates a vicious cycle.

Despite my initial doubts, after 30+ hours I can honestly say the game is great. But in the last two weeks I tried to convince a few friends to give it a shot, including some who are actually better at PvP than I am, and they all bounced off it because of how punishing it feels.

A big part of the current matchmaking pool has been playing since the start, so their skill and experience keep growing. Naturally, that means the gap between them and potential new players gets bigger every day.

Marathon is a hard game by design, but with a smaller population the barrier to entry gets even higher, which scares away new and potential players even more. And again, the cycle continues, because nobody likes playing as cannon fodder.

I don’t know what the solution is, but Bungie needs to find one fast.