Agreed.

I would be hyped to play a new version of actual Marathon, it’s a game that existed before my time and was only on Mac before they were cool so basically no one played it.

This is just a different skin on a genre that has no interest whatsoever to me.

It would have probably been pretty fun to play, but I do wish Bungie would one day get back to a single player narrative focused stories rather than building more multiplayer games…

Well, it’s pretty shitty that they introduced it in the first place, but this is a great way to respond.

Tbh, I could see a case where a new marketing exec asked for it to be added and the dev team hated the idea so had a rollback plan ready to go in case things went south.

I think expectations have grown astronomically since 2004, budgets have ballooned, graphical fidelity and animation quality has skyrocketed, development team headcounts have gone through the roof and many games just have more systems than they did before.

Games are less frequent because they take a lot longer to make, I read the other day that Halo 2 was apparently churned out in 10 months, these days even games building on other games foundations such as Tears of the Kingdom can take 5 years to come out.

98 was incredible, besides all the ones OP mentioned they missed:

• Metal Gear Solid
• Sonic Adventure
• Resident Evil 2
• Sonic Adventure
• Grim Fandango
• Caesar III
• Unreal

Surely one of the best years, only possibly beaten by 2004:

• Half Life 2
• MGS3
• GTA: San Andreas
• Ninja Gaiden
• Halo 2
• World of Warcraft
• Doom 3
• Killzone
• Fable
• Burnout 3: Takedown
• Lumines
• Far Cry

So many amazing games!