Marathon Expanded Universe / YMMV

YMMV Items for Game Mods of Bungie's Marathon series, which we've collectively dubbed the Marathon Expanded Universe.

Alternate Character Interpretation: That Lysander (of Rubicon) is malicious is not in question. However, despite appearing calm in the face of imminent death, he repeatedly emphasizes to the Security Officer that it won't matter if they kill him or not, and attempts to undermine their trust in Durandal—which, incidentally, would disincline them from finishing the job and smashing Lysander's core. Was he taking things as well as he appeared to? For that matter, how much of said malice stems from him just being kind of unpleasant to begin with, and how much of it stems from what's implied to be a heavily-prolonged mental breakdown with roots in severe emotional abuse?
- Hathor in Eternal is very much subject to this as well. That she's a villain is beyond question... until her Heel–Face Turn, that is. That we're nonetheless supposed to sympathise with her at times even before then is also beyond question. However, different players have had very different reactions to her character beyond that. Eternal 1.3 changes her characterisation substantially in places, which will undoubtedly create even more of this (though it also removes some of the ambiguity about her backstory and motives).
Applicability: Word of God indicates that although Eternal can be interpreted as having a Green Aesop - since the conflict between the Ascended Jjaro (powerful beings who rigidly insist on maintaining at all costs a status quo that they're at least partially responsible for creating) and the W'rkncacnter (equally powerful beings who essentially seek to cause chaos without regard for the consequences, and/or to destroy purely for the sake of destruction) would lead to the destruction of the galaxy without the player's intervention - it wasn't originally a conscious intention of the developers. However, many of them also seem pleased that it's a potential interpretation of the story, and they've suggested that 1.3 may play up this theme a bit more.
Awesome Art:
- Tempus Irae's textures and scenery, particularly the full-colour remakes for Aleph One.
  - Nardo began preparing a second remake in 2020 (titled Tempus Irae Redux as of 2022), and one of the team members has been posting some re-renders of old Vidmaster films with the 2020 textures on their YouTube channel... seriously, just look at them. (Any film labelled “2020 remaster” or “2020 rem”, or with a recording date of May 2020 or later, has the new textures.)
- Despite not having gotten an HD remaster (due to the author dying), remaster, the artwork for Pfh'Joueur also remains very impressive.
- Rubicon manages to create a biome that looks genuinely alien, and the textures for the Chimera genuinely look like a wrecked spaceship. Overall, it has a very sleek visual aesthetic and makes its settings feel real despite the limitations the designers were working with at the time (bear in mind, they made the whole game with the now-removed 1,024 polygon limitation).
- The 1.2 revisions of Eternal's textures, now that they have proper bump maps and glow maps, make them some of the most impressive textures yet seen in the Marathon engine. Moreover, the subsequent revisions in 1.3 give many of the texture sets more appropriate and vibrant colours and outright replace some textures with even more impressive new ones.
- Apotheosis X has some gorgeous enemy and weapon models with some incredibly fluid animations, and even the low-res textures look incredible.
Awesome Music:
- The soundtrack to Marathon Eternal, which features fantastic remixes of Marathon's music by Craig Hardgrove and Nick Singer, plus a few excellent original compositions by Thomas Livingston and Eike Steffen. Listen to it here (the video description also contains a download link for the music by itself, including a few tracks that didn't make it into the game).
  - Eternal's soundtrack is being massively expanded for its 1.3 release, and the new material (including works by nine new composers and arrangers, plus additional works from Hardgrove and Singer) is arguably just as high-quality. Since it's still a work in progress, it's not available on YouTube yet, but the codirector has made it available to download in FLAC (along with several other soundtracks).
  - Additional pieces of the Eternal 1.3 soundtrack are also possible to stream in the form of Marathon remix/arrangement albums by Cory King Tucker, Aaron Freed, and Talashar, though many of these have been altered somewhat (or spliced together) for their Eternal appearances.
- The various soundtracks to Excalibur have also been excellent, going back even to its original QuickTime/MIDI soundtrack from when it was still a Marathon 1 mod.
- Trojan also has some excellent tracks, particularly "Lune Noire", "Have Gun, Will Travel", and "Dance the Last Waltz With Me". It's online here. It was also recently remastered for the 2021 Director's Cut of the game; the remastered version (which is somewhat more dynamic, and therefore quieter) is here.
- Phoenix's soundtrack has quite a few bangers and fantastic atmospheric tunes as well, such as "Misuse", "Dice", "Babylon", "Animosity", and "Chronological". The Eternal developer responsible for remastering its soundtrack has recently remastered the whole Phoenix soundtrack and put it up on YouTube; you can listen here (and if you want to use it in-game, just get Phoenix 1.4, which already includes the remastered soundtrack).
- The experimental map collection hellpak's OST is just as experimental, but a lot more accessible - and frequently incredibly catchy. You can listen to it on YouTube or download it in FLAC. Each track also features unique artwork generated with Midjourney.
- Apotheosis' soundtrack is also quite impressive. It's not on YouTube yet (the creators have indicated that they want to do a bit more than a standard "soundtrack with game logo" for the video), but you can download a version suitable for standalone listening here (this version is properly tagged, has the silences at the start and end of some tracks trimmed, and has marginally better dynamic range).
Boss in Mook Clothing/Demonic Spiders:
- In Rubicon, the enforcers. Dear god, I never knew a health bar could be drained so fast. It doesn't help that they also have homing projectiles, and they *each* do 1/3 bar of damage on Total Carnage.
  - The Pfhor Chamberlains in the same scenario also qualify. They can't actually kill you, but they can strip your health bar down to the point where one hit from anything else will kill you, and they can do it in less than a second. Luckily there are only a few in the entire game.
  - The Salinger Plank gives us the insidious MaserBoBs, wielders of the powerful, perfectly-accurate Dangi Maser. If he sees you, you're as good as dead; they're more-or-less the human counterparts to the Enforcers. Luckily, you can pilfer their Masers and the ammo to load it with. Also, interestingly, at least "Core Wars" has significantly fewer MaserBoBs in Rubicon X than it did in Rubicon. Compared to in Rubicon, where it has something like seven, to the Rubicon X version, where it has two. Unsurprisingly, Dr Sumner cleared out the RX version about eight and a half minutes faster. (The RX version of the level also deleted some 140 polygons for unknown reasons; it's one of several levels that was completely overhauled for the re-release.)
  - The maser turrets are even worse, since you can't kill them. Luckily, they only appear on a handful of levels, of which by far the most annoying is "With Utility Bills Like These..." — and for that matter, most of the ones in "Core Wars" get shut off after you kill Lysander.
  - There are a few other annoyingly overpowered monsters, such as the floating mines, particularly the ones with the zap attack (although these might be largely difficult due to their janky hitboxes), and the drones with homing projectiles.
  - The Lookers in Rubicon inexplicably do more than a health bar of damage on Normal and above (which is far, far more than they dealt in Marathon 1). And they often appear in swamps, where players can't shoot or even see them.
  - In general, a lot of the unpopular Rubicon levels are probably mostly unpopular due to the overpowered monsters. If the Enforcers weren't so overpowered, for instance, levels like "Not *This* Again..." would be a lot of fun to play.
- Many of the A'Khr (and a few of the Pfhor) in Phoenix have infuriatingly fast firing speeds. These are the main reason the scenario is Nintendo Hard.
- The hateful floating jellyfish (internally named "Azrael") from Spacial Outpouring. Imagine the S'pht'Kr if they had twice the firing speed, a tendency to teleport into innocuous areas, and a burning hatred of Security Officers.
- Eternal had the orbs, which were basically its version of Rubicon's maser turrets. Fortunately, they only appear as adversaries in one (optional) level; elsewhere, they're aligned with the player. They're also substantially less extreme in 1.2 and on.
Breather Level: Some of the scenarios have these. In Pfh'Joueur, for example, the levels on the Nor'Haket tend to be less difficult than the surrounding missions, and in many cases have more to do with puzzle solving than they do with fighting off aliens. At the even more extreme end are the success dreams in Eternal, the first four of which basically just involve a trip down a mountain without any combat, and the last of which is an inverted version of the prologue level, again without any combat. The first level in each chapter of Phoenix also usually serves a similar purpose ("Positive Force" being an exception, but it's still short in comparison to the other levels in the game); additionally, "Sanctum sanctorum" and to a lesser extent "Tantive IV" are quite a bit less difficult than the other surrounding levels.
Broken Base: The entire Tycho Plank in Rubicon X, both regarding the quality of some of the levels and which ending is the best.
- Regarding the levels, a few levels are reused with few modifications from the original game^note, which is almost universally disliked, and the combat is generally regarded to be almost impossible (and not in a fun way) on higher difficulty settings, but there are fairly strong disagreements regarding almost everything else.
- Regarding the ending, it's widely disputed whether the Tycho plank or the Salinger plank is the "better" ending.
  - The Tycho plank involves betraying and "killing" Durandal (who may be a bit of a Jerkass but still generally comes across as something of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold) and killing a large number of scientists who were just doing their job, but it also appears to result in the virus samples being completely destroyed along with all knowledge of them. Lysander claimed the virus was incurable and that Information Wants to Be Free, which (if we accept him at his word - and since the game's tagline and main theme is "truth is the first casualty of war", we probably shouldn't) makes this arguably a superior ending for mankind generally, though it also becomes an extremely dark case of Black-and-Grey Morality on the player's part. On the other hand, the epilogue level, "Lazarus ex machina", strongly implies that we didn't actually kill Durandal; we appear to retain his primal pattern, and the level involves us inserting chips into a computer core, with the final terminal displaying Durandal rebooting. This level also indicates that humanity has no idea what occurred on the Salinger, suggesting that perhaps Tycho was being truthful and all information about Achilles really was destroyed.
  - The Salinger plank has us capturing the scientists. Durandal retains information about the virus. He tells us that he won't use this information against humanity, but even if we accept that he won't, we are left with quite a bit of uncertainty about whether information can leak out via the scientists themselves. On the other hand, we don't kill large numbers of more or less unarmed scientists who were basically just doing their jobs, nor do we betray Jerk with a Heart of Gold Durandal.
  - As a result, players still dispute which of these should be read as the Bittersweet Ending and which of these is the flat-out Happy Ending (some Take a Third Option and consider both bittersweet in different ways). The ambiguity is confirmed to have been deliberate on the writers' part - again, "truth is the first casualty of war". According to the main writer, D. Scott Brown, you're not intended to be able to tell for certain who's telling the truth.
- Eternal's level "Run, Coward!" was divisive in pretty much all its releases up until 1.2. Players either hated it because the main adversaries are stationary orbs that fire incessantly, were indestructible (until 1.2), and (again until 1.2) stripped away a bar of shields in under a second; or loved it for the exact same reason. This literally caused a two-page forum argument during 1.2's development that ultimately produced a level few people absolutely loved, but no one outright hated either. The orbs are less annoyingly powerful and can be destroyed with either fusion guns, the wave motion cannon, or the hidden gravitronic blade, but they damage players caught in their explosions and respawn after some time elapses; players also have a finite amount of ammo to deal with them that's quite valuable for the rest of the chapter, so they're better off saving it. The Pfhor and allied Drinniol also respawn occasionally, and the doors open much faster, making the level less of a Luck-Based Mission. It also features the aforementioned gravitronic blade, which can one-hit kill almost anything in the game, including the orbs, with Juggernauts being the only exception, plus a revised ending that now features a Continuity Nod to an earlier level ("Dread Not"). This actually serves as subtle signposting to where the player needs to go on that level. A subsequent revision also adds vacuum areas. 1.3 widens many of the corridors to reduce the odds of monsters blocking the player's path, adds allied drones and Juggernauts and windows (and vacuum areas), and allows most of the monsters (hostile and friendly alike) freer access to wander the level.
  - "Unwired" is another point of contention. Some people like it because it's basically a Marathon Level version of, well, a Marathon 1 level, but others dislike it because it is incredibly linear - there is essentially only one path through the level, which is virtually unique in Eternal, a generally fairly nonlinear scenario. A particular point of contention was a change in version 1.2.0 that created a particularly difficult gantlet that players weren't required to run in any previous release, making it arguably the hardest level in the whole game (an odd difficulty curve, since it's only the sixth level out of fifty-two). 1.2.1 reverts this so that players can bypass the gantlet entirely, as was the case before 1.2.0. 1.3, meanwhile, goes the route of replacing the level entirely - "Remedial Chaos Theory", its replacement, contains several recognisable segments of "Unwired", but much of it has been ripped out and rebuilt from scratch; some players have commented that the result feels like Eternal's take on a Phoenix level.
Complete Monster: In Eternal 1.3, the W'rkncacnter given the nickname "Apep" qualifies. Where Hathor is ultimately shown to be redeemable, Apep is never shown to have any redeeming characteristics whatsoever; it has myopically dedicated itself to revenge on our timeline for having the audacity to exist. It’s dedicated to committing genocide against every other species in our galaxy, but as far as it’s concerned, we’re in the wrong purely because it existed before we did. Thus, it pulls an If I Can't Have You… on the entire galaxy, and claims that it's simply doing this to restore its own timeline - even though that's Insane Troll Logic: destroying our galaxy won't even restore its original timeline. And to top it all off, a being as powerful as Apep is perfectly capable of simply... travelling to a different timeline that's more to its liking, so its actions are completely pointless; they're motivated by nothing more than resentment and spite, and it's simply invented an elaborate rationale to assuage any feelings of guilt it might otherwise feel about its actions.
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Rubicon is a downplayed example. Its story, graphics, sounds, overall level design, weapons, and monster design are usually regarded as good to great, but its game balance is widely disliked. It's commonly felt that Rubicon as a whole must not have been tested very much above Normal, and that the Tycho Plank must not have been tested at all above Normal. Two common complaints: (1) The Enforcer at the start of "The Descension Factor" is impossible to defeat on a pistol start. (2) The Lookers do more than a bar's worth of damage on Normal and above and are impossible to see in swamps. The monster physics also come in for repeated complaints here; some players have contended that Rubicon would be better if it used mostly vanilla enemy physics. (Another bizarre example: Juggernauts' bullets' area of impact is the size of players' SSM missiles' explosions, which makes the former effectively impossible to dodge. There's no indication anywhere in the game that this is the case.) For these reasons, Rubicon is commonly regarded as not fun to play on higher difficulty settings. That said, its gameplay is generally regarded as perfectly acceptable on Normal and below.
Genius Bonus: If you're familiar with Egyptian Mythology, the Eternal level title "Sakhmet Rising" provides an early hint as to what's going on in the story. Sekhmet (also spelled Sakhmet and a number of other ways) is (in many traditions of Egyptian mythology) the Omnicidal Maniac Superpowered Evil Side of the normally kind-hearted, fun-loving goddess Hathor. This level provides the first overt evidence that Eternal's Hathor has become less like her namesake and more like the mythological Sekhmet, although the full extent of just how vengeful she has become does not become clear until later in the game.
- "Enantiodromia" is another example: if you're familiar with the term from psychology or philosophy (which refers to a tendency of things to turn into their opposites, especially in the absence of balance), it clues you in on one of the game's major themes and foreshadows several plot events before they occur.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- Paco of RED is bound and determined to get his jobs done and indicated to be somewhat trigger-happy, with Ian at one point being mildly exasperated that Paco is trying to wring more ammo out of him yet again. Then you learn how he reacted to not being able to save the UESC Marathon or Tau Ceti IV, and suddenly this seems less like him simply being trigger-happy and more like signs of PTSD.
- In the era of COVID-19, the Synthetic Plague aspects of Rubicon's plot can come across as even more disturbing than they did when the game was originally released.
Hilarious in Hindsight: The name of Eternal, in light of the release of Doom Eternal, may qualify. Some of the developers of the Marathon scenario at least seem to find the name similarity amusing - they've made jokes about working on and playing Eternal "before it was cool". (The creators have also made self-deprecating jokes along the lines that the name Eternal refers to the game's long development process and/or loading screens.)
Jerkass Woobie: There's no doubt that Eternal's Hathor is a villain, but there are still several points in the story where it's difficult not to feel sympathy for her. In the final chapter, she arguably becomes a straight-up Woobie, as it's clear she genuinely wants to reform herself, but unfortunately, the means by which she wishes to do this would have catastrophic consequences, and by this point, her mind is so badly damaged that she doesn't understand the glaring flaw in her plan. (She genuinely does not understand that her plan to release the trih xeem on a system containing a W'rkncacnter, which she intends as a way to prevent a war that will lead to the extinction of organic life in the galaxy, is targeting the Sol system - this is confirmed by Word of God.) Furthermore, owing to the nature of the series, the player has no way to explain this to her, meaning that even when she comes to the player with good intentions, she is ultimately rejected - all of which just compounds the tragedy of the story. Ultimately, the player and Durandal-Thoth make the decision to reset the entire timeline back to the end of Infinity and see to it that Hathor is not woken up as a disembodied AI, which she regarded as a Fate Worse than Death (quite literally, as she had spent the previous century dead) and led to her Face–Heel Turn in the first place.
Nightmare Fuel: See the Expanded Universe's Nightmare Fuel page.
Overshadowed by Controversy: Portal of Sigma is generally regarded as a pretty good (albeit unfinished) mod, but it's mostly remembered now for a plagiarism controversy involving the primary creator rather than the content of the mod itself.
Paranoia Fuel: Connected to Nightmare Fuel above; many of the scenarios get this way.
- The level "Roquefortress" in Phoenix is an excellent example: the level is extremely dark, if you take a wrong step you will die instantly, and enemies come from anywhere and everywhere and it is difficult to keep track of them. It does not help that many of the enemies in this scenario fly and don't make any noise until they fire at you, and can take away a whole bar of health in less than a second. Oh, and the level is set out in a completely non-linear manner so it's impossible to keep track of where the enemies have been released. Have fun! (Despite that, the level, as well as the whole scenario, is awesome, and one of the best examples of Scenery Porn created in the engine to date. The main creator was an architecture major and it shows).
  - Another example of this is in "Escape Two Thousand" (which even creator RyokoTK has expressed dissatisfaction with). Overall, this level is a massive change of pace from the rest of the scenario in that it is heavily dependent upon platforming and being able to make precise shots with the crossbow; the player gets almost as much crossbow ammo in this level as in the rest of the scenario combined (this is barely even an exaggeration, lest you're wondering; the level contains some thirty-four crossbow quivers). However, before the recent 1.4 release, there were a couple of points where the player also got attacked by Defenders — who, again, can fly, and don't make any noise until they're right on top of you. There's nowhere to take cover for the first few of these attacks, which is probably the main reason this is such a divisive level. 1.4 nerfs this aspect of it. And there was much rejoicing.
- The swamps on the Pfhor planet in Rubicon have alien noises as random ambient sounds. There are also Lookers in the swamp (whose chatter is among the noises that happen as ambient sounds), and it's next to impossible to see them even if you have liquid transparency enabled due to the thickness of the sludge in the swamp. Needless to say, when wandering through the swamp, you're pretty much constantly afraid that you're going to walk over a Looker and die. Lookers do a ridiculous amount of damage in Rubicon, by the way - basically a whole health bar on Normal and above.
- Rubicon as a whole invokes this in its tagline: "Truth is the first casualty of war." To put it this way, the only person you can trust not to have it out for you if you don't turn on him is Durandal—and even he makes some questionable decisions over the course of the plot(s). For that matter, it's also clear that even in timelines where the player doesn't turn against him, he still outright lies to the player about at least a few things.
  - Though in Rubicon X, as it turns out, Tycho also behaves surprisingly benevolently should the player choose to align with him - he probably qualifies as a fairly dark antihero at worst. He claims to have little concern with the fate of humanity in one of the game terminals, but his actions throughout his plank make this claim questionable. The worst actions he's responsible for are sending the player off to slaughter the Dangi scientists and kill Durandal, but the former is arguably justifiable from a utilitarian standpoint (knowledge of Achilles in the wrong hands would kill some 99% of humanity, so the safest recourse for humanity as a whole is to destroy all memory of it; the scenario essentially posits a fairly massive trolley problem) and, as revealed in the epilogue, we didn't actually kill Durandal. Not coincidentally, this ties in with the scenario's dream story, which ends with the narrator destroying all record of his most dangerous work and fleeing.
- The final chapter in Eternal was more a chapter of Scrappy Levels in earlier releases, but 1.2 revamps it into a chapter full of this. Instead of having to fight off enemies every second of gameplay, it's more a case of having to be constantly on your toes for enemies that are well camouflaged and have a habit of sneaking up on you silently. The Phantasms/Banshees also can cause Jump Scares thanks to their attack sound (which is actually, as it was in Pathways into Darkness, a sample of a lion roaring from Sound Ideas' Series 6000 General library).
Play the Game, Skip the Story: EVIL's gameplay, monsters, weapons, sounds, and level design are generally considered decent to great (depending upon the level), but its "plot"...well, it's the least-discussed aspect of EVIL for a reason. (And most of the discussion it does get isn't particularly flattering.)
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Basically the whole fifth chapter of Eternal starting in version 1.2, for reasons discussed immediately below. "Deep Into the Grotto" and "This Message Will Self-Destruct" particularly stand out for this, though; both were considered some of the worst levels in the game in earlier releases, but are reasonably well liked in 1.2 and onward, if not outright considered some of its highlights. (1.3 also makes a few design changes to "Grotto" to improve its signposting.)
Scrappy Mechanic: Everyone who played Eternal versions 1.0 and 1.1 on higher difficulty settings hated the impenetrable swarms of monsters in the final chapter. This was toned down to manageable levels at some point around 1.2 alpha 4 or 5; the new versions are much better liked.
Sequel Difficulty Spike:
- Rubicon X apparently wasn't really tested much on difficulties beyond Normal, with the result that the levels that only appear in Rubicon X get really hard on Major Damage or Total Carnage.
- Tempus Irae II: The Lost Levels is generally considered quite a bit harder than the original Tempus Irae. Fitting, given its namesake.
Slow-Paced Beginning:
- A common complaint with scenarios such as Rubicon and Eternal that front-load their exposition. Rubicon X in particular has three levels before the game starts in earnest - "It Begins with a Ending", "Rozinante I", and "Veni vidi cursavi". This is one reason some players actually prefer the original Rubicon release, which only has "Rozinante I".
  - Eternal X 1.3, by contrast, splits up previous releases' infamously long opening exposition terminal into three - still a lot of exposition, but at least now players are doing something in between reading (even if it's just exploring and picking up weapons and ammo). The terminals also now introduce players to the non-vanilla mechanic of terminals triggering events in the game world, which appears again several times later in Eternal. We should note that Eternal X 1.0 introduced the exposition terminal (and indeed, the entire prologue level) because players didn't read the readme included with the earlier Mark releases and then complained that they couldn't understand the plot.
- This can also apply to gameplay, since a lot of scenarios feel it necessary to use a lot of really basic enemies like fighters and drones that everyone's already killed thousands of for their first few levels. Tempus Irae toys with this by making the first level, "Ain't My Bitch", start off with a bang – which works fine, but it means the next few levels feel really slow in comparison (though they're otherwise very good).
- Eternal gets this in a different way, owing in large part to how many revisions it has been through and how the end of the game used to be widely disliked - the team has spent so much effort improving the end of the game that a common opinion seems to be that it is now the best part of the game by a substantial margin.
That One Boss: Istoria generally plays quite fair (though players should probably choose nothing higher than Normal for their first playthrough, even if they're used to Total Carnage). However, "Born Under Punches" features the first appearance of a Flame IADD, a boss monster that one-shots the player even at full health. It has 3,000 HP, so it takes a lot of damage to kill, and its attacks travel quite fast even if you hit it with an Ice spell. Perhaps worst of all, it's not any easier on lower difficulties. Depending on what class you've chosen, it can be a huge roadblock to the player's progression; Deceivers will have a particularly difficult time, since their active ability does nothing against it. The intended solution is to use a Fury spell and then unleash as much Laser as possible while also firing at it, but switching spells in the midst of combat can also pose issues. The developers have indicated that this fight will be toned down in a future update. There are more Flame IADDs later in the game, but by that point, you have your own one-shot ability: the Black Hole spell. As a result, they're mostly trivial unless you've used up all your Black Holes and/or they catch you by surprise.
That One Level: Secret levels tend to be infuriatingly difficult, although there are exceptions (the last secret on Tempus Irae is mostly an excuse for porn).
- "Deep Into the Grotto" and "This Message Will Self-Destruct" were both Scrappy Levels in Eternal prior to 1.2 (actually, most of chapter 5 was, but these two stood out as being particularly disliked). In 1.2 and onward, some players have cited them as being among the best levels in the game. Even prior to 1.2, "Deep Into the Grotto" could actually be completed in a shade over two minutes on Kindergarten and probably around three or four minutes on higher difficulties, but the level's confusing layout meant that the only spoiler guide out there completely missed the short route. (This route doesn't work in 1.2, but there's an alternate, secret short route - which also requires a rather trivial grenade jump in the final release - that ultimately takes about the same amount of time to complete.) In terms of difficulty, the end of Eternal stands out for the massive swarms of monsters the player still fights, but fortunately, the respawn rate is vastly decreased from what it was pre-1.2. Also, for the first time in the game, players have a lot of ammo for the wave motion cannon and, starting in "Grotto", the gravitronic blade even if they skipped (or missed the secret blade in) chapter four's failure branch, which makes the combat a lot easier. The biggest danger here is probably the player's own overconfidence: the blade has a tendency to make people feel invincible.
- Speaking of swarms of monsters, Phoenix creator RyokoTK reckons his scenario's most difficult level is probably "Intervals". Some players may cite "Another Dimension" instead. Effective use of the energy katar can certain shorten "Intervals" a lot; one player managed to kill all monsters on Total Carnage, from a pistol start, without dying, in fewer than eight minutes.
Unexpected Character: Most players probably didn't expect the W'rkncacnter from Pathways to show up in Eternal, much less for it to address the player directly!

YMMV / Marathon Expanded Universe

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