Bungie:

Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We’ve taken this to heart, and we know we need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion within our Dev team, we’ve made the decision to delay the September 23rd release.

The Alpha test created an opportunity for us to calibrate and focus the game on what will make it uniquely compelling — survival under pressure, mystery and lore around every corner, raid-like endgame challenges, and Bungie’s genre-defining FPS combat.

We’re using this time to empower the team to create the intense, high-stakes experience that a title like Marathon is built around. This means deepening the relationship between the developers and the game’s most important voices: our players.

Translation to plain English: The game as currently imagined stinks, so we’re going back to the drawing board. We can’t explain why we, the game’s developers, didn’t know that it stunk, and instead seemingly needed to wait for scathing alpha test feedback from players — but Occam’s Razor clearly suggests the problem is that decisions at Bungie are made by executives with no taste.