My FOMO is real (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Sunday, March 22, 2026, 17:41 (14 hours, 9 minutes ago) @ ManKitten

I'm still hoping for that one moment that makes me get the game and give it a go. Originally I had no interest in Arc Raiders, but all they hype made me buy it and I love it.

They're fairly different games, despite both being extraction shooters. I think I like Marathon more, which surprises me. ARC got a lot right, especially with the ARC enemies. Those robots are just fun to fight, and they way they move and tumble around as you break them apart is cool. The UESC enemies in Marathon seem a bit more rote by comparison (and you can see a lot of Destiny in there--one of the dudes really just acts like a reskinned Fallen Captain), but there's enough variety that they're still fun to fight against.

It's been said before, but ARC is definitely more cooperative. It's basically shoot on sight in Marathon so far for me, but I'm still only playing on the first two maps. There might be enough going on that some solos might team up to do some of the actual map activities, but I haven't ever seen that happen.

I think Marathon is just overall more engaging on a moment to moment level. The world feels more alive than the one in ARC. Some of that comes down to quests. They're very similar between the two games (go to a specific place on the map and activate the quest objective, just with different flavors for what you're supposedly "doing" when you hold down the button). In ARC it's rebooting a radio tower or something, in Marathon, it's downloading or recovering data. The difference is that in Marathon, when you get back after a run, you usually have some new bit of information to read that is piecing together at least a potentially interesting story. Also, sometimes that actually happens in the game--I had to retrieve some data for NuCaloric, and when I activated the console, it actually started playing a audio log that I just sat there and listened to for thirty seconds or whatever, which is neat. Small stuff like that makes the world feel like a more interesting place than it does in ARC Raiders.