Gaming News Roundup: Marathon, Halo, Zelda — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Happy Friday everybody, Max here with your fix of gaming news. Coming up, Bungie blames Marathon's rough launch on its high difficulty, Halo Studios had a project in development before Activision took over, we got some details on that,

[00:12] and some more details on a cancelled Zelda spinoff from Ubisoft where you don't play as Link. Let's get into it. Half a year since it launched, it is safe to say that Marathon hasn't exactly been the smash hit

[00:33] that PlayStation hoped for, and Bungie admits that might have had something to do with its punishing difficulty and steep learning curve. While detailing some of the changes coming to the Extraction Shooter, the developers reflected on what went wrong. Kevin Yane,

[00:45] senior design lead stated, quote, Launch didn't go the way we wanted it to. We all built a game that we believed would resonate. But I think when you're so close to something, it's hard to see the bigger picture objectively. And so we made a game that was overly difficult,

[00:57] I think, for a lot of folks. And that constant loop of failure, I don't think spoke to as many people as we hoped it would. One notably punishing aspect of Marathon's PVPVE risk-reward gameplay loop is that players lose their gear upon death.

[01:10] Not just the gear they scrounged during a match, but the gear they brought into the match with them Considering how easy it is to die in the game that created an almost Sisyphean learning curve for all but the most hardcore dedicated and or masochistic players Game director Del Chaffee III called out Marathon PVP saying quote

[01:27] While death is the first step, for many players death was the only step. One of the things we learned at launch is that our game is pretty niche, he said. It's for sweaty people who like PVP, and to be fair, a lot of us on the team like those experiences.

[01:40] Bungie hasn't given up on Marathon quite yet, and it's committed to retooling the the experience to lean more into PvE and away from the seasonal update model. That next big update is slated to drop on December 8th, which is a few weeks after GTA 6 and a little over a month after Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 drops, which is bringing

[01:55] back its own DMZ extraction mode, so Marathon definitely has its work cut out for it. Speaking of studios that used to make Halo, earlier this week Microsoft made waves by gutting Halo Studios and handing the long-running Xbox IP over to Activision.

[02:09] we've got a little more insight into the reasoning behind that decision. According to Tom Warren at The Verge, a new Halo project was in development at Halo Studios, but it was still years away from shipping, so Microsoft quote, pulled the plug instead. It's unclear how far along this project was, but I'm guessing not as

[02:24] far as one might expect five years after the last installment was released, and it doesn't sound like things were going particularly smoothly Various leadership changes suggested some internal upheaval and one former Halo Studios employee took to LinkedIn recently to say quote I a jumble of thoughts and emotions but mostly relief I was miserable for the last year and a half and it be nice to feel something different There was supposedly a

[02:46] 10-year roadmap plan for Halo Infinite post-launch, and while it was relatively successful when it released back in 2021, I'm guessing that player retention wasn't quite enough to justify those ambitious long-term plans. What Activision has in store for Xbox's original killer app remains to

[03:00] be seen, but it is also most likely still a couple of years away, at least. We'll keep you posted when we find out more. And finally, speaking of cancelled games, here's one that I'm sad we'll never see the light of day. A spin-off of The Legend of Zelda, where you play as Ganondorf.

[03:14] Who would dare tackle such an outlandish project? Well, Ubisoft Milan, the very studio that already subverted one beloved Nintendo property when they gave Mario a gun in Mario plus Rabbids Kingdom Battle and its sequel, which were both very good games. This news comes by way of Insider Gaming's

[03:29] Tom Henderson, who reports the project was internally titled Goliath, and former Ubisoft developer John Marko Zana described it as, quote, a new Big Bang in the video game universe. Ubisoft Milan's Zelda game would have been a drastic departure from Link's previous adventures

[03:44] in Hyrule, initially focusing on a brand new, never-before-seen character. During pre-production, Nintendo asked that this character be changed to Ganondorf the humanoid form of the longtime Big Bad slash Pig Bad Ganon Henderson sources claim that Ubisoft Milan had a deadline of late 2023 to deliver a prototype but when the time came Nintendo decided not to move forward with the project for reasons not made clear

[04:06] Hopefully someday more details trickle out about this, because I would love to see what direction they were taking it. Whatever they were doing, there's no way it was the weirdest Zelda spinoff. You have to go pretty far off the spirit tracks to be any more bizarre than Ripon Tingle's balloon trip of love,

[04:20] the puzzle slash dating sim, starring Tingle that was only ever released in Japan for the DS. Look it up. It's weird. Anyway, if you'd like to play some games that actually came out, great news. You can score a whole bunch of awesome ones

[04:33] for super cheap as part of the IGN 30th Anniversary Bundle over at our sister site, Humble. For just 15 bucks, you can grab a curated collection of PC games that includes the Elder Scrolls Online Elsewhere, Remnant 2, BlazBlue Entropy Effect,

[04:46] Raven's Watch, Subnautica, Thronebreaker, The Witcher Tales, and Sonic Adventure 2, and proceeds go to support Child's Play Charity, which is dedicated to bringing games to pediatric hospitals to improve patients' lives through the power of play.

[04:58] Head to humblebundle.com and grab those before they're gone. That is your fix for Friday, September 25th, 2026. As always, for all things gaming, keep it locked to IGN, but more importantly, have a great weekend, everybody.

[05:10] Go play some video games. A whole bunch of them just came out.