Like many Marathon players, I was wondering when the hell I would hear any news about the next season of the game. In a blog on Monday, Bungie answered my questions—never, because there is no longer going to be a third season of the game, and they’re changing a lot of other things too. Despite the apprehension this fills me with, this is all probably, hopefully, a good thing.
Originally, the third season of Marathon was set to begin on September 22nd. According to the blog from Bungie, while there will be a small update on October 6th, which will reset the game’s economy, provide a new battle pass and also have some quality of life updates, plans regarding seasons and the overall structure of the game have changed.
“The content originally planned for September will now arrive as part of our Symbiosis update on December 8,” the blog says. “Alongside the new Runner shell, permanent PvE experience, and refreshed Perimeter zone, the update will also include a social space/firing range, an experimental TDM mode, and improvements to new player onboarding.”
The blog also says that in the future, Marathon will no longer have seasons.
“Instead of tying major updates to fixed seasonal deadlines, we’re giving the team more flexibility to build, test, and improve features before they are released,” Bungie wrote.
The updates intended for Season 3 of Marathon are now coming on December 8th, in an update dubbed Symbiosis.
All of these are welcome changes. Some of the additions are really no duh moves—the game provides mods for guns, but it’s hard to tell which ones you’ll like or dislike when there’s no firing range. As someone who sucks at this game, I usually die before I can test my loadouts, never to see those guns again. But what excited me even more than that is the addition of game modes other than what has been the core of the game, an extraction shooter.
I have grown to love the extraction format because of Marathon, but it is a niche genre. It’s high risk, high reward, and it puts a lot of pressure on players to fuck over other players rather than cooperate. If you’re going to lose all your gear when you die—and death comes switftly—then you’re probably going to try to kill everyone you meet. A lot of the time, I am the player you are killing to survive, and this sometimes leaves me at a loss when I’m trying to learn maps or new mechanics.
A lot of people have told me that they’d try out Marathon with me if it had a PvE mode, because the pressure of the extraction shooter genre isn’t appealing to them. While there was a temporary PvE mode, Vault Breaker, a friend of mine has often described that as more a training ground for learning how to play the endgame content than a real mode in and of itself. With the Symbiosis update comes a permanent PvE mode, “providing a new way to explore, progress, and engage with the world beyond traditional PvPvE extraction gameplay,” as Bungie says. And if you enjoyed Vault Breaker, that’s also coming back temporarily as part of the update later this September.
Now, if you are familiar with other games Bungie has developed, some of these additions might sound a little familiar. With the addition of a social space and an “experimental PvE Deathmatch mode,” another friend of mine called this update “Destiny 2.5.” (Yes, I do in fact have two friends who play Marathon, which may make me unique among the game’s playerbase.) One hopes that these additions will breathe new life into the game, which has not been as successful as Bungie, or its parent company Sony, has hoped. Sony has framed Marathon as underperforming, but also insisted that the game “remains an important part of our portfolio” while laying off workers from the Destiny 2 and Marathon teams. More recent news of Bungie looking into subletting its office space has not been encouraging—there is a very real fear that Marathon will be the last game Bungie ever makes.
The Marathon community has been in doomer mode since before the game came out, and the reaction to having to wait another three months for content that was supposed to come out this month has not helped the general attitude. In fact, players of Destiny in the Marathon subreddit have pointed out that updates being delayed just before they were supposed to come out is something that they’re unfortunately quite used to. I cannot tell what the future has in store for Marathon, but it is interesting to note that people were asking for ways to interact with the systems in Marathon outside of the extraction shooter genre since well before the game came out. I want this news to be the shot in the arm that the game needs, because I think it’s a great game, but I am deeply afraid that it’s too little, too late.
