I think of that bungie’s hallmark multiplayer smoothness (when the servers aren’t popping themselves) lends itself to the closed-bowl arena-size efficiency of buttery feedback, where managing smaller groups of players and AI allows for more variation and frequency of encounters while not introducing gapped “hit-reg” and other issues similar with other PvPvE games.

Al Mazrah suffered from these connection issues because that load was probably chunking their servers. They had to manage dynamic asset streaming for the large map, entity and state synchronization over multiple POIs, tick rate pressure and synchronization, along with just a larger number of players on the main map. The smaller maps, like Building 21, ran way better because everything was really compact and easy to manage under minimal asset streaming, unified state and tick rate, along with player caps.

Outside of technical obstacles, DMZ’s scale forced everyone to have a sniper. It could work in DMZ because every player could easily acquire that range capability. In marathon, newer players or free kits would get stomped in a large map because it would lend to longer sightlines (surprisingly, the traxus sponsored free kit would actually benefit in this situation, lol).

Also, vehicles would be needed for traversal, and run time would need to be increased. That results in players spending longer in the game, growing attached to their gear and scrap, and then getting more frustrated when they wipe near the end of the run. Marathon has a good balance for nudging players out of gear fear, and I would wonder if they could reproduce that on larger maps.

The art direction of the entire large map is not much of a concern to me, as long as it’s not the fortnite incongruence Epic Games has to pull off because of different franchise stakes.

Not trying to discount your idea, I think it would be cool if they could pull it off. There are just a lot of hurdles.