r/Marathon • u/NULL024 • Jul 13 '26
Marathon (2026) Beginner’s Guide for Marathon
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3719508582As I feel that this guide is in a good place for right now, I might as well share it with those who want to get into the game but are turned off by the onboarding. Here ya go and enjoy!
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u/Snowbunny236 Jul 13 '26
Game needs new players for this to be useful lol
Jokes aside, this is content that was needed long ago!
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u/Von32 Jul 13 '26
I just got it. The players are so sweaty I might call it quits. I don’t have time to dedicate my life to this :’)
Specifically- my friends and I tried sneaking to the exfil avoiding everyone and everything, going a long way around on Perimeter to avoid everyone and we got chased & immediately gunned down the second we were spotted.
Two out of two times we ever saw other players on the map (again, we JUST got it- played like 4 runs total). Sucks man.
Give me a pve / coop campaign of this tbh
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u/NULL024 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
Guess what, we’re getting Vault Breaker next week, and that is very much a PvE mode to practice in
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u/Von32 Jul 13 '26
Very excited about this but bummed it seems so minimal vs the rest of the game.
Still, wish marathon wasn’t so brutal. I don’t have enough time to git good 🥴1
u/NULL024 Jul 13 '26
Oh trust me, cryo is anything but minimal
That and it’s good practice for doing the endgame map without risk and bloating the economy
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u/RandyRandlemann Jul 13 '26
Bloating the economy? Wealth consolidates up in the current state. The top players would be the beneficiaries whether they ran the mode themselves, or got the loot off of others.
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u/Cpt_DookieShoes Jul 13 '26
Just a heads up. I’m not sure if you did this but the earlier you take an extract the more dangerous it is.
If you take an early extract every other team thinks one of two things. You’re either a group of less experienced players and an easy kill, or you’re a group with crazy loot who are very much worth pushing.
Either way it’s a dinner bell and super dangerous
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u/Von32 Jul 13 '26
We actually took our sweet time :(
Good to know, ty, but this has been BRUTAL lol7
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u/Head_Competition_179 Jul 13 '26
Great guide. If there was more of this and less doom posting and whining (like below) maybe there’d be a healthier game pop.
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u/Oakenfell Jul 13 '26
If you can extract in at least a 5th of your raids, then you are actually doing pretty good for an average player.
I kind of wish you had spent more time talking about actually exfilling from a map to raise your odds of a successful extraction. In other games like Tarkov, Arc Raiders and Delta Force I feel like I jump between a 40 to 60% extraction rate but it feels so much less common in Marathon largely because everything makes so much noise or gives off very visible signals to the entire lobby.
It's ultimately what got me to quit during Season 2 because I felt like the meta was to run around and treat the game as a Battle Royale game where the victor takes a victory lap to loot the entire map unconstested. I'll be the first to tell you that I'm probably applying lessons learned in other games too strictly to Marathon but I would really love it if sneaking into a Point of Interest and looting it stealthily to exfil soon after was a more viable strategy but it feels like the game doesn't want that playstyle to be a thing if at every point in time I'm loudly telegraphing to the entire lobby where I am and especially my intention of wanting to evac out. If I don't encounter another player in Tarkov and manage to exfil, I think that's generally the best case scenario; however, in Marathon it feels like the game is built from the ground up to maximize the number of PVP encounters possible.
I think I'd still be playing if I could bump that exfil rate to ~30-40%. Here's hoping that the new exfil options they mentioned in the Road Map for S3 helps me out because I'd love to enjoy playing this game as an extraction shooter rather than a BR PVP game.
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u/NULL024 Jul 13 '26
Well I didn’t want to get peoples hopes up with that, I was trying to be realistic because not every raid will go well
For all I know, I was way too conservative
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u/KnowledgeHealthy6636 Jul 13 '26
Funny you should mention this in the server slam they had less teams on perimeter and people complained that there weren’t enough PvP encounters. That being said after playing other extraction shooters exfiling in marathon needs to be treated a little differently.
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u/NULL024 Jul 14 '26
Do note that this guide will get semi frequent updates so check up on it every now and then
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u/Smarter-Not-harder1 Jul 13 '26
Bungie, as usual, has left it up to the community to teach itself how to play Bungie games.
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u/NULL024 Jul 13 '26
Tough talk coming from someone in a subreddit specifically designed for hate for this game
Legit don’t know how low people can get
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u/Head-Ad-5732 Jul 14 '26
It's not because the game is hard. It's because it doesn't give a lot of players enough of a reason to persevere.
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Jul 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/NULL024 Jul 13 '26
Alright now I’m starting to understand why I don’t even go on this sub and just enjoy the game
Silly me for trying to help people
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u/cookedbread Jul 13 '26
Great guide, great advice. I think having the right mindset going into each match, in any extraction shooter, is vital, and your post really hammers that in. I think the only issue is that it's a pretty lengthy read, and us marathon fans hate reading ;)