Bungie Outlines Marathon Season 2 Plans, Acknowledges Season 1 Problems
Bungie, and Marathon game director Joe Ziegler in particular, has published a lengthy end-of-season blog post reflecting on Marathon’s first season and laying out what’s coming in Season 2 and beyond, and to their credit, they’re not sugarcoating what went wrong.
The honest part first: Bungie admits the game is overwhelming for new players, that the endgame balance has issues with bubble spam and spawn rushing dominating matches, and that there’s no real way to just chill out and play without sweating every run. Those are real problems, and it’s good to see them acknowledge it plainly instead of corporate-spinning their way around it. Of course it’s even more of a problem with over half of the playerbase quit playing and only the really sweaty players remained.
Season 2 is bringing some meaningful changes. Duos returns as a rotating queue. The Vault is getting expanded. A new matchmaking system is coming that should produce better quality matches. Faction and Runner level progression rates are going up, which addresses one of the bigger complaints about the grind. There’s also a new Runner shell called Sentinel, a new challenge called Night Marsh, and a revamped stat acquisition system called the Cradle.
The more interesting stuff is the experimental modes. Season 2 will test a PVE-lite mode early in the season and a full PVE co-op mode later, where crews complete objectives together across multiple matches. Purely PVP modes are also being considered down the road.
Looking further out, Season 3 is targeting a major onboarding overhaul and big updates to Perimeter. Season 4 goes deeper on the extraction loop. Season 5 is where they plan to pull the full PVE and PVP ecosystem together.
More details on Season 2 content drop the week of May 25th.
Patriot’s Point: I actually liked Marathon, but dropped it after a few weeks. I’ve watched it bleed players, and it’s not surprising they’re starting to dip their toes into PvE. Hardcore PvP extraction is very niche, and it’s baffling they didn’t consider that before launch. The gunplay in the game is, like all of Bungie’s titles, first class. If the game has any hopes of surviving, they need the PvE mode or modes to be fun, casual friendly, but still offer a challenge, and something rewarding enough that people want to do it. It can’t just be, here’s a PvE mode, but the better gear is in the PvPvE area. And this game could benefit massively from PvP only modes like Team Death Match and King of the Hill, but 6v6 not 3v3v3v3 or whatever. Now if only the Destiny director could remove his head from his ass and deliver a post like that for the Destiny 2 folks.
