As a retired Destiny player, Marathon feels like coming home. Bungie’s extraction shooter borrows plenty of ideas from Destiny despite being a completely different kind of game. There are vaults, lore, Triumphs, factions, and more interplanetary resources than one person could ever hope to keep track of. There’s just enough shared DNA that I’m already begging Marathon to get my favorite Destiny feature: its own dedicated mobile app.
If you’ve never played Destiny, I imagine that you’ve yet to see the light of the Destiny Companion app. Built as a sort of second-screen experience to Bungie’s content-loaded MMO, the app allows Destiny players to get a whole lot of work done without opening the game. In addition to tracking player stats and showing what vendors have in stock each day, it also lets players manage their gear, check on active quests, claim lost items, organize their clan, and more. It’s a life-saver for Destiny players that makes it easy to parse the game’s flood of information.
Considering how much is going on in Marathon, a similar companion app already feels like a must-have. I’d kill for a convenient way to manage my Vault on the fly, selling off unwanted items or even setting up a loadout with some easy drag-and-drop touchscreen controls. Being able to check shop inventory, easily see what materials I need to get faction upgrades, and manage my Contracts could go a long way towards making Marathon’s myriad of systems a little less intimidating.
Most of all, though, I need an app for the lore. Marathon features tons of unlockable text logs that build the game’s world out in great detail. I don’t always have the time to sit and read a chunk of text when I’ve got teammates chatting at me between runs. Having a way to read everything on my phone away from the game feels like a no-brainer, especially when Bungie famously crammed all of the original Destiny’s lore exclusively into the app. Plus, just imagine Marathon’s stylish UI adapted to a tidy phone app.
It might sound like a strange request, but Destiny players know that external apps are core to that experience. Beyond Bungie’s official Companion app, you can find plenty of fan-created apps that can help you manage inventory, build loadouts, check Xur’s exotic inventory, and more. Some of those have become essential community creations that let players get the busy work out of the way on their own time so they don’t have to waste precious playtime lost in menus. It’s helped make a long-running MMO, one filled to the brim with loot and activities, more manageable.
Marathon fans are already in building mode. In-progress apps like Runner are starting to pop up, but none of those can directly interact with the game as there’s no publicly available Marathon API to build on yet. I hope that changes soon, because Marathon has the potential to be another community-driven experience if Bungie leads the charge. A Marathon Companion app is just one small first step towards building that foundation while making its hostile world just a little more survivable. A little.
Marathon is available now on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
