‘Marathon’ NDA Alpha Leaks Show Visual Improvements, Detail New Additions

I’m honestly a little surprised that we haven’t seen more leaks out of the NDA-ed Marathon Alpha that’s been running, but that’s what the threat of legal action will do. It also signifies that maybe that’s what Bungie should have done with the last Alpha, as originally planned, as we may have avoided that whole negative news cycle.

This info is from Twitter user @itsrocksiza, who says they have not signed an NDA, but have access to information and (now deleted) images. He says Bungie contacted him to delete the images, and while not legally required to do so, he did it to be nice. I did save them, but I’m not going to actually post them here for a similar reason. But I’ll talk about what was shown.

• A series of outdoor screenshots show a much more finished look with more density and far better lighting than the last Alpha, confirming large improvements have been made not all that long after the last test.
• There’s a shot of what appears to be blue blood pooling in water after a player death, similar to what we’ve seen in cinematics. There also appears to be at least some experimentation with actual enemy corpses left on the map after death, albeit with a duffel bag still present. These reflect player complaints from the Alpha, as it seemed out of step with all the promotion to have enemies simply evaporate.

• The Black Market has materials exchange where you can trade higher tier ones for lower tier. They have new icons.
• The map legend now more clearly says where things like anomalies and bosses are.
• There’s a new sniper called the V99 channel rifle which takes volt cell ammo, handles similarly to the TF2 sniper.
• Resurrection timers are a lot longer.
• The new medic runner has the ability to give a players a heal drone that follows them to restore health over time. They can also drop medkits. Said to play similarly to Apex’s Lifeline.

As I’ve always said, leaks aren’t leaks when they’re positive! I mean, not really, and you all should not break your NDAs, but here we are, and all of this sounds like improvements from the last public Alpha, and relatively quick changes being made/tested.

This is obviously not everything. Bungie said there will be further tests before release, though what the mix of NDA-ed and invite-only and eventually public tests will be is not confirmed. Bungie has not given a new Marathon release date, but says it will this fall. It’s likely to be before the end of the 2025 fiscal year which ends in March. We’ll see just how many changes and additions Marathon can get before that release, and if they might change its fortunes.

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