Bungie Gives Details On Marathon: Durandal For XBLA

July 17th, 2007 by Erich Jurgens in Action, FPS, Xbox360

At their press conference at E3, Microsoft announced that a slew of titles would be heading to Xbox Live Arcade. One of the titles that caught people’s attention was Marathon: Durandal, the first sequel to Marathon, Halo’s virtual predecessor. Today Bungie posted a whole page full of information on Marathon: Durandal and the changes that have been made to make the game more suited for XBLA.

Many people were asking why the sequel to Marathon and not Marathon itself was being brought to XBLA. Bruce Morrison from Freeverse, the developer working on Marathon: Durandal, clarified why they chose to throw numerical order into the wind. He explained that there were two factors in their decision. Marathon 1 was technically impractical to bring to Xbox Live. It was a fairly old game and was based around a format that the team wasn’t used. Marathon 2, on the other hand, had already been ported to PowerPC based Macs, which is not only similar to the Xbox 360’s hardware, but Freeverse is more comfortable with it.

The Freeverse team also felt that Marathon 2 was the best of the three, and that it worked out the best if they could only port one of the Marathon games.

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.

The game includes several new features in the Live Arcade version that weren’t included in the original. The saving structure has be altered to be less “frustrating”. Marathon: Durandal has a new networking system to work with Xbox Live, and, of course, it supports Achievements. The game looks immensely prettier too. It runs on a true 3D engine in true 720p High Definition at a constant 60 frames per second.

Unfortunately Freeverse has been unable to port over the saved films feature that was present in the original Marathon 2. You’re going to have to rely on your memory.

Tags: Action, FPS, Xbox360