Marathon launched its second season yesterday, a follow-up to its March launch, the culmination of years of work as it tries to be a rare live-service win for Sony. The publisher is giving it time, but the game has already blundered into a botched launch day, and there’s at least one in-game feature that seems like a pretty clear mistake as well.

Shortly after Marathon season 2 launched, players began running into a copious amount of errors with animal names, ones that Destiny 2 players have long been familiar with. I managed a single exfil before those took over, and eventually, things got so bad that Bungie took the game offline entirely for a number of hours.

Again, Destiny 2 players are familiar with rough launch days and disconnects, but in the context of Marathon, the stakes were higher. Not only is it the second season of the game and many returning players were annoyed, but it was also the first day of its “free week,” where players can check out the game if they haven’t paid the $40 access price.

On top of that, this was meant to align with promotion in the highly anticipated PlayStation State of Play last night, but once it was advertised, players could not actually play it with the servers offline. My sources confirm this was not a DDoS attack by angry Destiny players or general Marathon haters, but rather just terribly timed backend problems.

The issue here is that for many players, you only get one chance at a first impression. It may not be at all fair, given that the free week extends through next Tuesday, but trying to log on and finding the game to be unplayable for 10 hours is going to make some people roll their eyes and walk away.

When servers came back online at 11 PM ET there was naturally a playercount surge, but it almost certainly would have been higher without these issues. The next test is to see how it does over the weekend, but for a launch day, it couldn’t have gone worse.

This is a secondary issue that players are now running into now that the game is online. Players who achieved high-rank status last season were gifted powerful kits with purple gear from day one. And as a result of these server issues, Bungie gifted a half dozen free kits to players, and now lots of people are running around with blue or purple shields on day one. And if you start with good gear, you can go back to the hardest content almost immediately and likely get more from there, and then things can snowball.

This is a problem because the main point of an extraction shooter wipe is just that, a wipe. Everyone is supposed to start at the same level once again, outside of the sponsor-only modes. Now, you have players who didn’t play day one or simply didn’t try to play at all, and who weren't gifted the “sorry you got disconnected” kits, are behind. Even dedicated players admit that this is not an ideal way to start the season, as you’re letting certain groups skip ahead rather than the slower build a wipe like this is meant to create.

It’s a huge week for Marathon , and Bungie can’t afford many missteps, big or small, when first impressions are everything. We’ll see how things go as time presses on.

Follow me on Twitter , YouTube , and Instagram .

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .