Marathon feels like the yin to my Arc Raiders yang

In my most recent Arc Raiders session, I was merrily sharing the spoils of a defeated Rocketeer with the random players that helped me take it out. In the closing hours of Marathon‘s Server Slam, I was stalking enemy teams, viciously ambushing them, and hoovering up all the loot from their corpses.

Both of these extraction shooters present the same opportunities for collaboration – there’s proximity chat, there are objectives and tough enemies that could be defeated alongside others, and there is no specific incentive to mow other players down instead of walk by them with a cheery remark. They both have large arsenals full of tools with which you can dispatch other players. While Embark Studios and Bungie have different artistic interpretations, both are tonally all about gritty survival in challenging environments and uncovering lost secrets. And while your hard-earned loot is almost always on the line, both games give you risk-free footholds back on the ladder, should your supplies get dangerously low.

Yet, I find myself wanting to live two opposite lives in Arc Raiders and Marathon.

In Embark’s extraction shooter, I live for the emergent moments, the less hostile players, and the easier ride to ticking off quests and projects. There are still moments where its map conditions (such as the atmospheric new hurricanes), its beefier Arc enemies, or the occasional bloodthirsty player will raise your heartrate, but for the majority of the time, it’s a more relaxed place to be, and I love that.

However, despite sharing all the similarities I mentioned earlier, I feel hardwired in Marathon to be far more savage. If I see other players, I won’t be politely waving them on by – I’m shooting first. If another squad rolls up to a public event thinking they can help out and get a share of the spoils, think again – this loot is for my squad and my squad only. When I’m optimizing my loadout before runs, I’m making sure I’ve got all the attachments, cores, and implants I need for maximum PvP lethality.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly why the red mist descends in Marathon. Sure, we were all anticipating a more hardcore, competitive experience from Bungie versus what we see in Arc Raiders, but it’s not like there isn’t just as much opportunity to go get aggressive in Embark’s game.

I believe it comes down to perspective – and no, I don’t mean that in a washy, philosophical sense. As a first-person experience, I think a lot of players immediately slot into the competitive psyche that so many other FPS games require – Apex Legends, Rainbow Six Siege, Halo, Overwatch. First-person means precision. First-person means battling for victory for your team. First-person means your gun is constantly visible right in front of your nose.

I genuinely don’t think that Arc Raiders would have become the more approachable, social, cooperative game it is today if it had been first-person like Marathon. While you can still engage in some intricate gunplay, its third-person perspective means you’re constantly reminded of your place in that world and your actions. Your character takes up more of your screen than your weapon, you see them physically throw up a hand to wave to another character, and you observe them actually taking part in those occasional emergent moments. I’m not saying that, by default, any shooter that goes third-person will become this softer, more social experience, but given the vast amount of similarities between Marathon and Arc Raiders, it’s the only thing I can really pinpoint that makes me want to play them in such radically different ways. Either that or I’m massively overanalyzing, and it actually boils down to the fact that one has a literal chicken as a vendor, and the other doesn’t.

All of this is to say that I’m glad these two extraction shooters make me want to play them in different ways. Should the intensity and PvP battles of Marathon become too much, or if the chummy scavenging for rubber ducks in Arc Raiders starts to wear thin, I know exactly where to turn.