'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

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Welcome to Disk Cleanup , our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"

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.