After hosting an Alpha playtest and taking in community feedback, Bungie has announced that Marathon will no longer be launching on September 23 as was originally planned. Currently, the extraction shooter has no set release date, but the team is committed to hosting more playtests to address community concerns and add new features.
The official Bungie news post breaks the news that the development team has made the difficult choice to delay Marathon, but does not give another timeframe for when we can expect the game to launch. The reasons appear to be based on player feedback, as the post reads, “Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We’ve taken this to heart, and we know we need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion within our Dev team, we’ve made the decision to delay the September 23rd release.”
It isn’t all bad news, however. The dev team outlines a clear roadmap of what it plans to improve or add over the coming months to make Marathon as good as possible. Some highlights include new types of loot and dynamic events on runs, adding more narrative elements to interact with in the world that more closely match the original lore, a better solo player experience, and proximity chat.
The post concludes stating that we will hear more about progress on Marathon sometime this Fall, which is also when a new release date is promised. This heavily implies that the game will be pushed into 2026, but we will wait for full confirmation from the team in a few months.
Marathon was met with a mixed reception when it debuted its gameplay and hosted an Alpha test earlier this year. Despite never announcing a price, many were already hesitant that it wouldn’t be worth the asking price based on what was shown. For now, it seems like Bungie is taking all that feedback seriously and doing its best to make Marathon a hit when it does finally come out. Whether or not that comes to pass, however, is yet to be seen.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.