'There were a lot of disagreements across the place': Former Marathon director Joe Ziegler on leading Bungie's extraction shooter, playing Path of Exile for 3,437 hours, and why he'll never uninstall Kingdom Hearts

Joe Ziegler might be best known for his role guiding the design of big competitive shooters, but his formative gaming experiences were with point-and-click adventures like King's Quest. "There was something so clever about trying to use all this knowledge about random things like fairy tales to try to solve puzzles inside of the game," he says. "It was just that 'A-ha!' moment where videogames could be these really engaging ways for you to be clever and creative."

Ziegler started out at Pandemic Studios, where he worked as a mission designer on 2009's The Saboteur. But he is best known as game director on Riot's hugely popular arena shooter Valorant, and his more recent oversight of Bungie's extraction-shooter revival of Marathon, which he assumed leadership of in March 2024 following the dismissal of former director Christopher Barret.

Following Marathon's launch, Ziegler left Bungie and is currently working on a new, unrevealed project: "My goal ultimately when I'm thinking about 'What do I direct and what do I make?' is 'Where can I make the coolest thing with the coolest people?'" he explains. "That's part of the reason I went to Bungie in the first place. And now, as I'm looking at this next thing, I'm also in that headspace."

Ziegler took a break from his secret project to show me around the best loot spots of his Steam library. We talked JRPGs, ARPGs, and the forgotten Bungie game that led him to work on Marathon.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm playing a couple right now. I'm revisiting Elden Ring Nightreign again. I play it socially with some friends. We're doing a lot of the Deep of Night and purple boss stuff. It's a game that's near and dear to me.

It's funny because my initial reaction to it was like, "What is this game?" But over the course of time, it's combined my love of soulslikes—I really like a lot of soulslikes—with this multiplayer roguelike, where every run you're building a build and trying to conquer the challenge that's in front of you. The level of difficulty keeps it constantly a mastery challenge—which is something that definitely motivates me.

A lot of it is playing off of your mastery and understanding of stats that exist in Elden Ring. I played a lot of Elden Ring, so it was easier for me to onboard, and I can imagine for people who have not played a lot of Elden Ring, it's impossible to onboard into. But if you do, you begin theorycrafting a lot of things when you're on your run. You're like, "Oh, should I go for a bleed-based run this time around, am I using the right character with the right arcane stats to do that?" All of your knowledge and all of your capability … come together.

The other game I'm playing is Star Wars: Galactic Racer. Someone called it Race the Spire and I totally agree. It's basically a roguelike racer, and I don't know if it's just the change in pace of playing a racer again, but I think it's been really interesting to see that level of roguelike progression folded into a racer … where all the different components of thinking about your racer become more flexible and interesting from a buildcrafting standpoint.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Oddly enough, I was revisiting Destiny 2. A couple of people I know were getting back into Destiny 2 a little bit, so it was fun to jump in with them and experience going through some stuff.

I have about 730 hours, so I'm not as hardcore as a lot of other people. But D2 is definitely comfort food …. I was originally playing a Warlock. I played a Warlock for quite a few years, and then I just recently went back to playing a Titan, and I was levelling up my Titan again. And I was playing mostly a prismatic spec.

Way back when I was 16, I played a lot of Myth 2 [with] a friend of mine from high school. And oddly enough, it came with a box that had a ticket to go to E3 at the time, which was really crazy. So the first E3 I went to was because Bungie shipped these tickets. I talked to Jason Jones about this, and he was like, "That was all Alex Seropian, and Alex Seropian's marketing mentality was that." So that's how I remember Bungie. Of course I played Halo, just like everybody else who lived in America.

It was the legacy of all those games, Halo to Destiny, that really drove me to work at Bungie … it was actually a couple of friends that I used to work with at Pandemic who were at Bungie who approached me, and one of them was Justin Truman, the former CEO … we started working on something. But then they needed help on the Marathon project, so I went over to help advise and then they asked me to come take over direction for it, and I did that.

It's always interesting jumping into a project when it's already been started, because part of it is getting everyone together and being like, "What are we trying to do here?" And sometimes some teams will find a unanimous voice, everybody knows what they're doing, and some other teams will have very disparate ideas of what they're doing …. I found this project was… it had some areas where there were definitely some ideas about where we were going, but there were a lot of disagreements across the place.

So part of where I was advising was trying to bring those all together and be like, "Hey, what is the cohesive place you want to go to? And how do we get there?" And then when we landed on that, I could help them drive that.

I'll say this about Bungie, which I really like, and it's still very true about Bungie: it lives in two worlds. One is this world where there's a lot of legacy to live up to, which is a lot of pressure. But there's also this other side of it, which is that it's a very egoless company. In a lot of cases, they are always looking for some way to improve, and the way they do that is, oftentimes, by bringing in people who are new to help them figure out what they are missing.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

The Secret of Monkey Island—1990 was when it was released. And that's pretty long ago, 36 years now! I feel old.

It's funny, because I've never had the luxury of talking to Ron Gilbert or Tim Schafer, or any of the guys who worked on this whole game. But I will say that The Secret of Monkey Island was formative for me in that adventure game, discovery loop way. Partly because it combined the clever puzzle solving that is iconic for point and click adventure games from that era. But I think that it's that cleverness, that irreverence, that idea of everything being both a pun and world play, and how it plays out, that resonated with me a lot.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Ooh, this is going to show my other addiction. I love ARPGs. Path of Exile. I have 3,437.5 hours.

ARPGs to me are [about the] buildcrafting and the cleverness of putting things together. And I think Path of Exile is the most freeform version of that. The level of experimentation you can get in that game is so wide in terms of thinking about how you can make builds.

I play a variety of builds. I have a fondness for playing Totem builds, and then second to that is, when I'm feeling really lazy, I like one-button builds, like Whirlwind builds … that's the fun part of Path of Exile, to be honest, is that it's just such a Rube Goldberg machine of effects and things that you can make, and you're just trying to figure out how to deal the most damage and kill things the fastest.

I think I've changed my expectation around ARPGs because of Path of Exile. It's funny because I've played Path of Exile 2, and it's a little bit more limiting, and it totally makes sense because it's built around more of an action environment. But I definitely feel like Path of Exile one was more meant for me.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

This is a gimme for anybody who knows me, and it's a hint that exists on every interview that I've done, because I wear a Kingdom Hearts necklace on every single one, and that's the game I'll probably never uninstall.

I have this weird tradition where, every once in a while, I'll go back and play through all those games. Part of it is nostalgia, because you're harking back to a time when you were younger and you had a summer break. And honestly, Kingdom Hearts, for all its confusing and overly complicated narrative, it's still a story about growing up, right?

They're all kind of packaged together now, but I will say my favourite is Kingdom Hearts 2. I think it's the one that's most likely to make anyone tear up. I think it has to do with the identity of Roxas and Sora, and the two different sides of that character. The soul that exists there. There's something about innocence that can be painted in different ways. That's really fascinating in terms of characterisation, how they can live two different lives, but they can be so similar to one another, and how they're so connected that way. It's really cool.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

Any online gamer would probably say the same thing, which is Discord. I've been at companies where we've used it for work. I use it almost every night to hang out with my friends and game. We use it to post dumb stuff to each other. It's just the default social hub for my close friends.

Our little group is a few friends I've been really close with since the Riot days, and so we've changed up games a lot … I will say that every time a new World of Warcraft expansion comes out, we probably play it.

WoW is the other thing I've played a lot, but that's not a Steam game. I will say that I have over three-years of in-game time in WoW, so that's way too high. And we counted one time on Valorant, me and the technical director of Valorant had basically had a comparison like "Which of us has spent more time in Wow?" And I think he came in just around two years, and I came in around three years. I was like, "This is insane."

I would say everybody in the industry was playing WoW a lot for a long time …. I think there's a lot to be said that's positive about the gameplay, and I think a lot of people point to that. But my theory, if you want to hear it, is that it was social media before social media. It was basically the common space that a lot of people could get together and socialise while playing. It was before the Discord era, before any social media hub or even Twitch, right? Back in the Justin TV days. It was the place you could default to go into and get things done, but also just hang out with people.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Not at all. There's two reasons for this. One is because I change up technology at least every couple of years. So trying to keep everything tidy feels like a fool's errand, because this machine I have is probably about a year old … but the other thing is that I rarely am ever on my desktop. Most of the time, it's covered with some [other] screen. It's either my browser or Discord. So I never really see my desktop. I never access anything from my desktop.