Extraction shooters were supposed to be the next big leap, and Escape from Tarkov was the movement’s exemplar. Titles like Jager’s The Cycle: Frontier and Call of Duty’s DMZ failed to generate meaningful traction. Many mistakes stem from a misunderstanding of Royale’s place in shooter evolution, creating an inability to conceptualize what’s next. Bungie’s Marathon is the genre’s last great hope.
Battle Royale radically transformed the FPS shooter landscape. Since PUBG’s 2019 launch, Battle Royale formats went from 0% to nearly 50% of the shooter market, capturing 1/5 of all game playtime. Nearly every AAA shooter franchise was forced to bow: Call of Duty, Battlefield, CS:GO, and GTA all experimented with Royale formats. BR was a revolution that every major franchise felt, and yet, since Warzone in 2020, the subgenre has been in innovation limbo. Studios burned VC funding at scale, but genre-shifting innovation hasn’t followed. Meanwhile, a separate Eastern crop of mobile Royales has propagated, with its most notable feature being traditional Eastern live ops cadence.
Extraction shooters felt like the next logical evolution, a subgenre advancement. Their core thesis appeared tied to the return to the stakes Royale first introduced, but was watered down with more frequent respawns in each iteration. However, this thesis misunderstands shooter history.
Extraction shooters represent DayZ’s true lineage, while Battle Royale represents a branching alternative. Escape from Tarkov originated in 2016, three years after DayZ’s release, and was developed nearly simultaneously with H1Z1, DayZ’s battle royale spin-off mod. The original DayZ contained elements familiar to players of survival games like Ark and now even Palworld: hunting, crafting, and base building. Extraction is the shooter’s interpretation of these elements.
The Battle Royale genre succeeded by embracing roguelike in-round progression: scavenge randomized loot, grow stronger during the match, and fresh strategic variance every round. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene’s original design was on this basis: randomized weapon spawns create different conflict spots across the map, and fresh strategy mastery. Successive attempts have embraced collection but reduced stakes, but there’s been little innovation since Call of Duty’s Warzone. Publishers seemed to believe they had picked all the low-hanging Royale fruit.
Instead, AAA shooters tried incorporating Extraction, but Battlefield and Call of Duty whiffed. Ironically, My.Games’ Hawked came closest to a design breakthrough: simplified objectives and clear win/loss states. The ceiling for extraction will remain low unless someone convincingly rewrites the meta.
So where does that leave Marathon? With a bold art style, the ambition is there. However, Marathon needs to move past Tarkov’s influence and reimagine what the next battle royale looks like, “extraction” influence or not.