Season 2 of Marathon kicked off earlier this month, and thus far it's been a season of ups and downs. Things started badly, with Bungie's traditional launch woes undermining its free-to-play week. But new features like the Night-time Dire Marsh map and its Sponsored Survival quickly proved hits popular with the community.

A few weeks in, however, new problems have emerged. Basically, progression in Marathon has become too easy, which is ironic considering the game's formidable reputation. Where you felt lucky to extract with anything of value in Season 1, Season 2 players have apparently been hoovering up so much loot that their vaults are overflowing with goodies, throwing the game's economy into disarray.

Earlier this week, Bungie published a Steam post explaining what had gone wrong, and what might be causing it. "Out of the gate in Season 2, progression and access to power moved much faster than the previous season," the developer wrote. "For reference, the average wealth in week two of Season 2 is similar to what we saw in weeks 11 and 12 of Season 1. And while we did want to increase progression speeds, we didn't land at a place that's healthy for the game."

Oops. As for what's causing this issue, the answer appears to be a combination of factors. For starters, there were several contributing bugs that Bungie says it's now fixed, such as "guaranteed gold drops in places that shouldn't have them". The rush of Sponsored Kits at the start of the season also gave progression a boost, as did a combined issue with "Sponsored Survival grind" and a valuable chest in the Complex Control area, with players milking Marathon's mostly PvE mode for all it was worth.

The primary factor remains somewhat elusive, however. According to Bungie, there's an issue making higher rarity loot proliferate through the game. But the team doesn't know exactly what's causing this. "This isn't something we've seen in our internal playtests, and we're still unravelling the source." Curious.

While it investigates this, Bungie has made some other "tweaks" targeting progression, such as turning off boosted containers and nerfs to Cradle XP rates. But these are temporary measures, which Bungie plans to "reverse later in the season when we have other solutions in place." Hopefully the team will figure out the root cause of the problem soon, though I'm sure there are some players who don't mind having a slightly easier time of it on Tau Ceti IV, at least in the short term.

The infamous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was a low point in CD Projekt Red's history. With hype levels at critical mass, the RPG released in a buggy, unoptimised, and downright unfinished state that was so bad the PS4 version of the game was pulled from the PlayStation store. The company's share price tanked, investors filed a class action lawsuit, and CDPR's reputation was left in tatters.

Yet at the same time, Cyberpunk 2077 was a huge commercial success, and CD Projekt used some of those profits to fix its broken blockbuster. Its 2.0 patch, combined with the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion, addressed many of the RPG's problems, successfully turning around the game's reputation and cementing its place as a roleplaying great.

As far as I'm concerned, all is forgiven. But CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowski doesn't believe this is the case for everyone. In a live interview at DevGAMM Gdańsk republished in the Edge magazine's Knowledge newsletter (via GamesRadar), Nowakowski lamented that Cyberpunk's launch debacle likely lost the studio some fans permanently.

"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," Nowakowski told interviewer Jörg Tittel. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back—if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next."

While there may still be some holes in CDPR's reputation, the experience of fixing Cyberpunk did leave the studio in an advantageous position. Not only financially, but also in terms of its team. "We were left with seasoned, battle-hardened veterans; leaders who were able to carry a different kind of challenge on their shoulders," Nowakowski explained.

This, according to Nowakowski, is why CDPR was able to spread into a multi-project company, with both The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 currently in production, as well as the mysterious Project Hadar. The goal is to become a more prolific developer. But not too prolific.

"Our dream is to be making more games, although we never want to turn into the studio that's going to be launching a big game every year," Nowakowski said. "It may happen. But this is not the goal. We have a rough ten-year rolling plan, but the goal is not to flood the games market with CDPR games."

It's going to be a while before we see the results of CDPR's more prolific structure. The Witcher 4 isn't due until 2027 at the earliest (and I suspect is more likely to arrive in 2028). Cyberpunk 2, meanwhile, may not arrive until 2030.

This is probably why CDPR has greenlit a third expansion to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Songs of the Past, which is being built by The Thaumaturge developers Fool's Theory, is due to be released next year. The expansion is expected to provide a big extra chunk of Witcher-ing, estimated to be similar to Blood & Wine in scope.

It's quiet, save for the faint pings of a street light shifting ever so slightly in the wind down the street. So quiet, in fact, you'd be forgiven for forgetting this is Grand Theft Auto 4.

What's before you better resembles Fargo. It flies closer to the likes of Twin Peaks, reimagined in video games over the years by the likes of Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition. Here in Heartland, an enchanting WIP total conversion mod from creators Kultur-Remix, less is more. Which is hardly how you'd describe Niko Bellic's over the top exploits under the bright lights of faux-NYC Liberty City. But that is sort of the point.

"Cities are nice and all," says Kultur-Remix, "but many of us have only seen Los Angeles or New York through a television screen. How many of us have been through boring suburbs or rolling plains and crop fields in flyover country? Sure, it sounds boring, and if you aren't familiar with suburbia or rural America, this may not be the game for you.

"But, if you grew up with them like our devs, or are at least willing to open your mind and explore a part of America that isn't frequently explored, you'll be in for a treat."

There's an omnipresent calm-before-the-storm vibe to Heartland. It doesn't quite stride into the realms of anxiety—that would do its placid, welcoming nature a disservice—but there is a distinct uneasiness that underpins its suburban purview. By design, it's hard to put your finger on it. It's perhaps body and mind-related, a point of muscle memory that extends to controlling the character models and animations of GTA 4 and simply expecting chaos.

The rise of liminal spaces horror in recent years, not least on social media feeds, treads a similar line in that the super-mundane can project more than meets the eye. In Heartland, this eerie minimalism is illustrated by Sharon's place in 2006 Midwestern America, where crop is king and opportunities are scarce. The mod's blurb describes the protagonist's life as "driven by video games and her job delivering food for the local pizza joint"—a situation that goes awry and is then untangled over the course of 30 missions as the hero finds herself exploring worlds "she never knew existed". In reality, all of the above was inspired by the creators' formative experiences while carving a path in rural suburbia two decades ago.

Kultur-Remix adds: "One of the lead writers has a job delivering pizzas and did it for a few years in a 1980s Buick Skylark. The setting in Heartland is based on many of our developers' lives in boring suburban and exurban hometowns; a boring teenage-young adult life screaming to be let out.

"Despite trying to draw from real life parallels as opposed to doing what GTA normally does and drawing from movies, the closest piece of media we could allude to Heartland would be 1979's Over the Edge. That said, no direct parallels or references have been made to it in the development process of Heartland. Sharon being based on Mary Lynn Rajskub's role as the pizza delivery girl in Weezer's The Good Life music video is probably the only deliberate reference to an outside piece of media in the mod."

From its top-down beginnings last millennium to GTA 5 and the lawless murder grounds of GTA Online, the Grand Theft Auto series has hardly taken a breath in 30 years, and so projects like Heartland, for me, deserve credit for what they don't do as much as anything else. That's not to say it's without its moments of unbridled chaos, but at its core, it's a game about a disenfranchised young adult, forged by its creators' experiences and designed to be relatable to its players.

"First and foremost, we want to bring a unique experience to a great game," Kultur-Remix says. "A story about post graduation young adult angst and a desire to fit in with a crowd, regardless of how bad that crowd may be. Sharon's story will be one many of us can relate to, regardless of social class or country of origin.

"But we would also like to design a map for roleplaying potential. Mods like LCPDFR are quite popular and we would be remiss if we didn't design it for mods or roleplay servers like that. For example, we have a town hall interior fully-modelled with a wing for the sheriff's department. It has zero relevance in Sharon's story but, if someone were to make a roleplay server with the map, they wouldn't have to look too far to find a place to start their game as a cop. We are hoping to make it all open source upon release so it can be adapted to whatever people please.

"Ultimately, through all of this, we are creating a time capsule within a post-9/11 world, depicting pre-recession life in America. Most of our devs have lived through it and remember what it's like, seeing all kinds of shitbox cars on the road before Cash for Clunkers got rid of them all; and turning on the radio and hearing nu metal and pop rock being referred to as 'new' music."

Of course, the rise of the cozy genre and, going back a little further, walking simulators have a lot to answer for here. Games like Gone Home, Tacoma, Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch are standout examples of era-specific worlds defined by nostalgia, and Heartland in many ways feels like the Grand Theft Auto modding community's answer to all of the above. There's a story, characters with rich lore, missions that follow the familiar GTA framework—but there's also wider themes of economic crises, the slow death of the middle class and the omnipresent threat of war on the world stage and how that impacts the daily lives of the blue collar workforce.

As a result, Heartland feels like one of the most authentic total conversions to surface from the GTA hobbyist scene in recent years, as a grittier, warts-and-all look beyond the action movie facade more closely associated with the series in 2026 and now on the cusp of its next blockbuster outing. It's for this very reason that the team chose GTA 4 as opposed to its successor to build Heartland on in the first place.

Kultur-Remix adds: "The short answer as to why we've chosen GTA 4 for the mod is because it's the underdog of the series, just like us.

"San Andreas, while a good game (and with all due respect to those who are doing story mods for 3D-era games), just isn't the best for character-driven stories because it's quite stiff. Heartland was originally a Vice City mod but switched for GTA 4 due to budgetary reasons.

"When we saw the HQ model of Sharon taking running and sliding to cover, we knew we'd made the right decision. Why we didn't choose 5 is mostly because it doesn't do driving, gunplay, etc. as well as the fourth main series entry did. We don't want to reinvent the wheel to tell a good story, so the logical step is to make it for number four.

"From here, we're focused on refining scripting, voice acting for the main characters, mixing radio stations, and working on interiors. And bug fixing too! We'll be damned if this comes out broken, given how long we've spent working on it."

Follow Heartland's development here.