philtron wrote:I think Ryoko's point about BioShock is a pretty good one. In addition there's games like Wolfenstein the New Order which I've heard is a pretty successful FPS in terms of storytelling and design. Plus some of the appeal of Dark Souls could apply to a Marathon remake, as well (in terms of tone/mood and in-between-the-lines storytelling).
The New Order and The Old Blood are fantastic! I had forgotten about them until after my previous post but they are really solid and fun. The presentation is wonderfully pulpy and pretty much takes a dimestore trash storyline about the Nazis unlocking a secret magic source of power to its logical conclusion. The gameplay doesn't really do anything new for the genre but it had a pretty decent stealth system, while also having the courtesy of letting the player completely opt out of it and win the game with pure run-and-gun if you want to instead.
Dark Souls' appeal isn't directly the tone and method of storytelling, it's the high difficulty and the community that it very successfully built around trying to unpack the incredibly dense and obscure gameplay; trying to unpack the dense
story came afterward and I pretty much guarantee that if the gameplay wasn't completely on point with Dark Souls, no one would give even a fraction of a crap about the story. And I really, really hope Bungie doesn't try to ape From Software in this regard because they are not as good at level design or gameplay design or difficulty tuning; they never, ever have been.
I feel like Bungie has completely exterminated all of their Halo good will. They don't develop Halo anymore, 343 Industries does, and since then the games have been awful. Meanwhile Bungie has made Destiny, which is a really divisive game as far as MMOs and probably managed to screw up almost everything Borderlands did right, which already wasn't much.
Honestly I don't think there's any reason
Bungie should make another Marathon game. I'd like to see another company, like Machine Games (who made the modern Wolfenstein games), take a shot at it. Their take on Wolf was really remarkable and memorable, they made a fantastic character out of BJ Blazkowicz, and it had fundamentally solid gameplay backing it up. Like, they understood what made Wolf 3D good back in 1992, but they also remembered that it wasn't 1992 anymore.