Emergent Gameplay: Marathon vs Arc Raiders

Joy through the unknown

The recent Alpha releases of both Marathon and Arc Raiders have opened up an opportunity to analyze the impact of emergent gameplay on player experience within the context of online multiplayer shooters. These two games are vying for the same audience, built on the same core genre identity, and yet one has received massive praise and the other has found waning interest. So what experience drove players to leave Marathon behind and play many more hours of Arc Raiders as the days went on?

Player Engagement

It was quite obvious out of the gate that Arc Raiders was receiving growing attention over time while Marathons Alpha players were dropping out on a daily basis. One noticeable difference in player engagement was seen through the enormous amount of clips being shared of Arc Raiders. The bulk of which were player reactions to moments unfolding in ways they didn’t anticipate. An example of this can be seen in a video of well known streamer Shroud, being overtaken by AI enemy bullets filling the screen with chaos while approaching a door only to realize it was locked. In a last ditch effort to survive, he jumps down into a hole finding safety and given a moment to catch his breath. You can clearly see the emotional range this engagement elicited throughout the clip. Anxious attempts to survive turn to smiles of delight when he realized he made it out alive. The experience left an emotional impression.

Compare this with the few shared videos of Marathon, many of which result in no emotional engagement from players. In fact, while researching videos for this write-up, I realized that many of the videos are design critiques asking bungie to fix, change, add or remove game features to make the game more fun. In a world where online games live or die by hours played and shareable moments, Marathons design seems counter intuitive to what you would want to deliver in the genre. If your sandbox cant provide delightful one-off experiences how can it survive the ask for players to replay the same experience over and over again?

Tight Loops vs Emergent Systems

Marathon has been design with a tight grip on the gameplay loop. So tight that almost nothing interesting can emerge in a given session. The maps are simple, objectives are basic, enemies point and shoot. There is really not much that can happen over dozens of matches that will provide emergent gameplay moments. Without which you don’t get players moving though thrilling adventures that they hope to reexperience in new and interesting ways when they queue up for another match. It seems to me that in an attempt to appeal to the widest possible audience, including the most casual of players, it became impossible to deliver a sandbox full of mystery and intrigue. Which is interesting since Bungie themselves initially revealed Marathon with statements pointing to them wanting the game to be full of mysteries that would emerge and change gameplay patterns as maps evolved through player discoveries. None of which were present in the Alpha, or even mentioned in any of their recent livestreams. It may have been too big of a design issue to solve and could easily have been scrapped long ago.

Emergent Gameplay and the Core Audience

Anyone paying attention to games in the past couple decades will have seen many developers make the same mistake over and over again. Abandoning a core audience, or never even appealing to one is a death sentence for most games. Core audiences, while a small fraction of the overall player base for a successful game, are the beating heart that pumps life into the atmosphere around a game. They share videos, talk there friends into playing, and watch streamers play their favorite game. There are all of these touch points that are necessary to build interest. But core audiences don’t exist if your game design fails to appeal to them. If your making an extraction shooter it might be a good idea to design your sandbox to provide the expected experiences, plus some unique ones you are bringing to the table.

In the case of extraction shooters, emergent gameplay is the core that feeds player interest for potentially thousands of hours. Creating a closed loop with very little variance in potential outcomes has now been shown to outright appeal to nobody. Not incumbent players and definitely not causal players who would need an incredible incentive to play a game that is design to very often provide negative progress.