Marathon’s playtest wasn’t great for Bungie, but Arc Raiders’ design director says it was a “great A/B test” for them

There should have been two major extraction shooters launching in the last quarter of this year. One of them is Arc Raiders, which is in fact coming out later this month. The other is Marathon, which, well, you know. Interestingly, though, with both games hosting tests earlier in the year, there was an opportunity for Arc Raiders’ developers to learn something from Marathon.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Arc Raiders design director Virgil Watkins said how it was “very coincidental that they had their test around the time we did. To my knowledge, I don’t think any of us knew that was going to happen. It was a very great A/B test for us, because obviously they made decisions that we didn’t, and vice versa. So we could kind of compare and contrast how some of those things shook out.”

In particular, Watkins notes how the Arc Raiders team was able to gauge how people responded to the pair of extraction shooters’ differing takes on the genre. “[It] was quite interesting to follow in what players thought about those certain things, or what did work in their context and didn’t, and what may have worked in ours,” he explained.

It is worth pointing out that Watkins said he hasn’t been deeply inspecting the game or anything, only a select few have been able to play Marathon. Bungie’s shooter is obviously in troubled waters currently, but Watkins is curious to see what becomes of it, saying he “[found] the art style very evocative … I’m personally curious to see how that ends up. I hope to see more of that in the future.”

Arc Raiders held its final playtest over the weekend and it seems to have gone quite well, so I myself am curious to see whether the full release will be the one to bring extraction shooters out of its deep niche well. Marathon is set to hold another test this week, but this one is under NDA, so don’t necessarily expect to hear anything about it (even if you can probably bet on someone breaking said NDA for Reddit karma or whatever the kids are into these days).