I’m struggling a bit with what you’re asking for but here’s what I think you’re asking for. You brought up two worries with Arc

• longterm gunplay
• meta progression

I think gunplay is at a really good point systems-wise in Arc. I think at this point the important long term factors are balance and variety. Balance is anyone’s guess in any single game or with any single company, sometimes they get close at the start and just make nothing but bad calls from then on like in Helldivers 2. So no comment on Arc’s long term balance but I’d give them no worse odds than Bungie to fuck that up - and based off the technical alpha feedback Arc is in a great place in terms of balance and Marathon is most definitely not.

Variety is an easy solve with extraction shooters in my opinion because you can control so many variables. You can have a busted gun but it’s ammo or durability decay is so large you only use it one run per find, you can make it a legendary drop, you can make it only good against players or only good against bots, etc. There’s a lot of factors in what makes a gun good when an economy and RPG elements are brought in. I imagine if they released a new gun every season or every 6 months or released a set of consumables and legendaries the variety would be maintained for a decade. Again, because there’s a bigger PvE emphasis in Arc than in Marathon from what we’ve seen, I’d bet Arc is able to keep things fresh for longer. Imagine a Javelin in Arc - it sucks against players but it crippled the Queen, that’s cool as hell and reasonably feasible. Marathon screams Apex gun design and I think Apex didn’t do a good job with their gun pool - every expansion felt like it hurt the pool instead of making it more diverse IMHO but that could have also come down to balance - I suspect marathon will be the same.

Meta progression is easy. Arc has a skill tree that I like (although it’s missing details which I think is important) and bench upgrades (and maybe vendor levels?). They also have battlepasses but this is actually a negative for me, I think current battlepass design sucks even if they’re going with the friendlier Helldivers style passes. They’re just boring. Still, more little “achievement” targets and rewards.

Those have been very compelling. Marathon has quests for a half a dozen vendors. I believe that’s it. I don’t recall a skill system, I don’t recall bench upgrades, just quests. I like the aesthetic, and I don’t really mind it all being just quests but between the lack of personalization in meta progression AND the fact it’s a hero shooter the game lacks the golden itch of individuality that I love when games have. I think marathon has significantly worse meta progression today AND I don’t think they’ve promised to make it better. That’s super important to me. Hunt Showdown is a great game but it’s lack of meta progression has made it feel shallow for me. Marathon, I imagine, will feel the same way.

Again, this comes down to Arc being good to go today with systems I can dream about them expanding. Marathon isn’t accessible outside the US right now and I imagine even if I could play it it wouldn’t feel even close to a finished project - and with a bunch of corpos making promises to the cameras my gut says if the game is good it’ll be in a year or two and even then it’ll be corporate good and not artist good.