Marathon finally launches next week, but Bungie has given players a "slice" of the experience a little early with the free Server Slam, and it's proven to be a major hit. In its first day alone, the open preview hit an impressive concurrent peak of 143,621 players on Steam.
Naturally, you would expect that figure to continue climbing over the weekend to even higher heights, right? Not quite.
In just two days, the Marathon Server Slam's concurrent peak player count has been cut almost in half, dropping to a 24-hour peak of 76,437 players at the time of writing. Of course, that's nothing to scoff at — Marathon is still in the top 25 most-played Steam games right now — but it points to some of the wider issues players have with the game.
Take one look at the subreddit, and you'll find countless complaints about the UI, slow pace, "sluggish" movement, lack of tension in PvP, and missing quality-of-life features, making for an obtuse first impression likely to put newcomers off. "The map is almost dead silent compared to any other game and the AI feels very very boring," one player wrote. "Very much let down so far."...
