Game Stooge

Marathon: Durandal’s Graphic Upgrade, Bungie Q&A

• Scribbled on July 18th, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Microsoft Xbox 360, Shooter, Xbox Live Arcade

Joystiq has a nice preview of Marathon: Durandal, showing the graphic upgrade from the original Mac version to the Xbox 360.

The most prominent of the features is the brand-new 3D engine that allows Marathon: Durandal to run at 60 frames per second, compared to the 30 frames of the original. As you can clearly see in the image above, the leap in quality is tremendous. The jump from using a keyboard and mouse to the Xbox 360 controller has already been bemoaned by some, but the developers at Freeverse have been aided by Bungie in their pursuit of FPS perfection. Online play will have a huge role in Durandal with support for up to 8 players in both cooperative and competitive modes.

The other note was that the saved films the original had will not appear - it being an XBLA game and all. Bungie discussed how the game in a Q&A on their site as well.

When asked why Marathon: Durandal was being ported to XBLA instead of the first one, they answered:

The Technical:
Marathon 1 was built for the 68k Macs in System 7.  Our team is a bit younger than that (Average age 25).  This format was less known to us.  Marathon 1 also was much more dependant on older Macintosh resources such as system sounds and resource forks.

We prototyped with the GPL Marathon source code.  It was available before we had a contract and it was well documented.  *NOTE* Marathon: Durandal does not in any way use the GPL Marathon 2 source code.

Marathon 2 was released for Windows with a Windows version and Windows source code.

Marathon 2 for the Mac was built for PowerPC-based computers, something Freeverse is very familiar with.

The Mac tools Forge and Anvil work with the Marathon 2 assets.

Marathon 1 is a very tiny game.  The maximum size of a Marathon 1 level is 256 polygons.  The maximum size of a Marathon 2 level is 1024 polygons.

The Non Technical:
We had to look at this project from worst-case scenario:  We only get to bring one of the 3 games to Xbox Live Arcade.  With that in mind we had to say, which is the most appropriate?  We universally agreed that Marathon 2 was the best.  It had the richest story and environment of the 3, and it was more mainstream and traditional than Marathon Infinity.  It was the right fit.

Liquids, Marathon 2 supports liquids, which add depth.

Dual Shotguns, quite possibly the best weapon ever created.

Thunderdome, one of the best multiplayer maps out there, Halo fans might remember it as Foundation.

Durandal, as a character he is very cool and his story is quite fun.

Robert Blake was played by none other than Jason Jones, we just had to get his smiling face on Xbox Live Arcade.

Are you excited over the XBLA version of Marathon: Durandal?