In the year 2022, PC Gamer’s Morgan Park asked if the then-pre-release extraction shooter Marauders could “dethrone Escape From Tarkov with dieselpunk spaceships and impeccable vibes.” The answer, we would later learn, was “no.”
Marauders launched into early access in October 2022 and came out of the gate with impressive concurrent player numbers on Steam, particularly given that it’s not a free to play game. But updates came to a halt in August 2024 with the launch of the Retribution update, and the early access notice on Steam now carries a warning that the game hasn’t been updated for more than 20 months.
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The whole thing is a bit strange—which isn’t meant to suggest impropriety, just that it’s weird for a game to suddenly pop back to life like this after two years of silence—but the reaction is, frankly, more positive than I’d expect. Naturally there’s plenty of “let it die” commentary in the replies on Steam, but a good number of followers are excited at the prospect of Marauder’s return, too. If nothing else, 11 pages of responses (and counting) just a few hours after the update was posted indicates to me that, yes, there is still some real interest here.
And maybe for good reason. No doubt a lot has changed since Morgan checked out Marauders in 2022, but even then he saw potential: “There’s not a lot to it in this closed beta build, a fact that may sway the Tarkov faithfuls from committing to it for now, but Marauders definitely has it beat in theming and approachability.”
Watch On
What this ultimately adds up to is impossible to say, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend dropping $30 on an early access game with a development roadmap on Steam that ends in “late 2023.” There’s also no getting around the fact that the extraction shooter milieu is even more crowded and tougher now than it was when the game went silent: Neither Arc Raiders nor Marathon were on the scene at that point.
But if Marauders really is back in active development (or, I suppose, if development has been ongoing all along and they just lost track of time), I think it’ll be one worth keeping an eye on.
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