Bungie says it already has a story plan for its extraction shooter Marathon that covers several years ahead, though the studio is leaving room for player feedback to influence where things go. Marathon launched on consoles and PC in March and has sold an estimated 1.2 million copies in its opening weeks, with that number potentially climbing past 2 million to date.

The studio has already made clear it plans to support the game long-term, and now creative director Julia Nardin has offered a closer look at how the story side of things is being handled.

In an interview with Games Radar, Nardin said the team knows the general direction of the narrative for the next few years, but stopped short of calling it fully set in stone.

“We know where we want to take the story over the next few years, but I don’t want to say it’s completely ‘locked in’ because it’s important to us that our players be able to help shape it,” Nardin said, describing player input in the story as “part of the magic of playing a live service game.”

What is already settled, according to Nardin, is the backstory of Tau Ceti, the planet at the center of Marathon’s world. Bungie plans to keep dropping clues about what happened there as the game continues to grow “in ways that are informed by its past and a future that excites our players.”

Nardin also brought up accessibility for new players, pointing to Destiny as an example of what the team wants to avoid. That game became notoriously hard to follow for newcomers, partly because older content was regularly removed from the game, leaving gaps in the story. With Marathon, Bungie wants every season to work as a fresh starting point.

“They’ll always be able to uncover the mysteries of Tau Ceti’s past while experiencing its present,” Nardin said. “We want every season to be a new entry point, and for new players to be able to understand what’s going on regardless of how long we’ve all been running.”

On the update side, Bungie says it is planning to roll out smaller, more frequent improvements rather than holding everything back for big drops. “Our plan is to get improvements out as soon as we can, rather than wait to drop them all at the same time (even though this might make them less obvious),” the studio said.