Marathon players are busy suggesting tweaks and changes to the game’s thermal gun optics, which remain a powerful tool in the hands of good players invested in the extraction shooter.
Thermal sights in Marathon work much like they do in any other online FPS – highlighting players brightly when aimed at. However, with Marathon as a high-stakes extraction shooter, the ability to quickly identify and shoot enemy players who are hidden in smoke, invisible, or otherwise obscured has proven extremely powerful.
Game director Joe Ziegler has previously expressed a desire to touch thermal sights in some fashion, with an early patch to the game nerfing them somewhat. This included reduced visual clarity on targets, and an adjustment to max distance for the thermal highlight. In a prior post on upcoming changes, Ziegler also called them “too present and dominant”, and indicated they’d recieve further changes in the future.
Here’s a recent Marathon cinematic trailer.Watch on YouTube
Yet the sights remain a significant issue. So what else could Bungie do? Some appealing ideas have arisen from the game’s community. This includes multiple suggestions to have thermal clarity scale with your target’s actual heat level. You see, in Marathon, sprinting or using abilities generates heat, and can leave you overheated if you do too much in a short span of time.
As Reddit user AbledShawl suggests, with a handy visual reference, thermal clarity scaling with the level of heat would keep the scope powerful in the hands of intelligent players, as they pick out enemies in the middle of a fight as abilities have been used. However, when it comes to initiating fights, or just spotting other players exploring a map, the power of a thermal scope would be reduced significantly.
There are other suggestions too, such as this one from Reddit user BigMoistPizza, who says: “Just make it so that the amount of heat you have is proportional to the distance thermals can see you from.” Still, while good ideas are plentiful, so are concerns around them. As Ggamebird on Reddit poises: “I keep seeing this suggestion and I’m not against it in theory, but won’t this also make snipers themselves more invisible to thermals since they’re more likely to be just sitting still not generating heat while the players their targeting are? Also signal jammers already exist as a counter.”
This is likely why a more substantial fix hasn’t been implemented as of writing. Such drastic changes would take an appreciably drastic amount of work, and could very well throw the balance and overall usefulness of the scope into disarray. Such are the woes of live service balancing!
My own take? Thermal sights by their nature are strong in a game like Marathon. Substantial visual changes are probably too much work to expect from a small patch in the coming weeks, though, so a reduction to the distance they work at or an increase in rarity are what I’d expect.
The debate around thermal scopes rages while Marathon players continue their push into the Cryo Archive map. It also comes shortly after some other big balance changes have been implemented, including the removal of an incredibly busted movement technique Thief players were pulling off. All while the development team says they’re in it for the long haul.