Score one against my own side this week, and it hurts more when the team wearing your colors trips over its own shoelaces days before kickoff. Bungie has delayed Marathon's next major update, a package called Symbiosis that was supposed to land September 22nd, all the way to December. The permanent PvE mode fans have been waiting on since launch goes with it.

Give the visiting bench this much, at least Xbox can't embarrass itself over a live-service shooter this week, because it doesn't have one in the fight to begin with. That is the closest thing to a compliment you are getting from me today, and I already regret typing it.

As Eurogamer reports, Bungie is also walking away from the "strict season schedule" it built Destiny's whole identity around, calling Symbiosis "the first major step in Marathon's next chapter" instead of season three business as usual. Rock Paper Shotgun confirms the same December window and the same abandoned cadence, so that much is settled fact, not spin from one blog post.

Here is the scoreboard as it stands: PlayStation ships an ambitious extraction shooter, watches the seasonal model wobble, and now has to prove December was worth the wait. That is a point docked, plain and simple, and I am not going to pretend otherwise just because the logo on the box is mine. Fix the PvE mode, hit the new date, and I will happily hand the point back. Miss it twice, and I start keeping a second column just for this.

This follows Bungie's recent denial that Marathon was merging with Destiny, which means the studio has now spent a month explaining what it isn't doing almost as much as what it is.