Marathon is just celebrating its release, but as a service game, it naturally has to think about the future. Bungie has already announced a lot.
As we all know, a marathon is not a sprint, which is why developer Bungie is thinking about the future. While the new shooter Marathon is just celebrating its release, we are already learning in a blog post from the developers what new content is coming beyond Season 1. And how the season progression works overall.
First, the potentially bitter pill: your progress will be reset to zero at the start of each new season. This was already announced during the server slam before release, and now Bungie is going into detail. Your earned progress will be almost completely wiped. Specifically:
- What you lose at the end of a season: All your gear, all completed contracts with factions, your faction progress, and your player level.
- What you don’t lose: Your cosmetics and the basic unlock for the faction.
Server wipes are nothing new in the extraction shooter genre; they have been around for years in Escape from Tarkov. Ideally, they are intended to prevent long-time players from becoming so powerful over time that newcomers don’t stand a chance.
On the other hand, Hunt: Showdown, Arc Raiders, and Arena Breakout offer alternative balancing options to achieve this without a reset. Or at least make it optional.
Beyond the wipe, we now also know roughly what to expect in Seasons 1 and 2.
All new features in Season 1 of Marathon
Season 1 bears the sonorous title “Death is the First Step.” The season lasts three months. In addition to the launch content of the base game, you can expect:
- The fourth zone, Cryo Archive, an endgame zone for experienced runners, where things get particularly heated. This zone is scheduled to be released immediately after launch.
- The Ranked Mode will arrive in the second half of March and adds a competitive leaderboard to the game, where you can unlock cosmetic upgrades.
- An ominous event called C.A.R.R.I., about which nothing else is known yet.
- A new gun.
- New augmentations for your runners.
Plus, of course, the obligatory patches and balancing adjustments.
The season is expected to run until the end of May, after which Season 2 will begin, about which we have also already received some initial information.
All previously revealed new features in Season 2 of Marathon
Season 2 is titled Nightfall, and appropriately includes:
- A night mission on the map Darkmoon.
- A new playable Runner Shell.
- A new system called The Cradle, about which we don’t know much yet. According to Bungie, this should allow you to adjust your Runner’s stats more granularly.
- Plus, new guns, mods, threats.
All of this is just a rough roadmap for now, which, based on experience, should be taken with a grain of salt. All signs indicate that Bungie will also have to put a lot of manpower into post-release adjustments and patches after the launch of their service game in order to iron out the worst blunders from Marathon. This often affects the timing of a roadmap; Season 1 of Battlefield 6, for example, was postponed by almost a month.
