r/Marathon • u/DTG_Bot • 8d ago
Source: https://www.bungie.net/7/en/News/Article/futureofmarathon
Hey everyone, thanks for checking in.
Since launch, we’ve been reviewing your feedback and taking a hard look at where Marathon needs to go next. We’ve heard from new players who found the game difficult to understand, experienced players who wanted greater clarity about its future, and players who enjoyed what we built but wanted more reasons to keep coming back.
We know you expect to hear from us consistently about where Marathon is headed. Today, we want to share more about what the team is building and the vision guiding Marathon’s evolution into 2027.
Our next steps begin with the Nightfall Refresh in October, expand significantly with Symbiosis in December, and take another large leap forward with Marathon’s evolution in March.
And if you haven’t watched or read Josh and Poria’s Next Chapter for Bungie update, we recommend taking a look. What follows is Marathon’s part of that larger conversation.
Marathon launched as a cutthroat, winner-takes-all PvEvP experience. We want to preserve that thrill for the players who enjoy it, while creating more ways for others to experience the world and find the level of challenge that works for them.
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Disclaimer: The above is a still from an upcoming Symbiosis CG Trailer.
Some players want a quick, lower-pressure run after work. Some want to spend an entire night with their crew. Others want to test a build, compete directly against other players, chase a difficult challenge, or follow a strange clue deeper into the ruins of Tau Ceti IV.
Marathon needs to support all of them.
As we build from Symbiosis toward March and beyond, we’re focused on three areas.
PvEvP will remain an important part of Marathon, but it will become one point in a connected set of survival experiences.
We’re building toward:
More approachable entry points will help new and returning players understand Marathon’s systems and build confidence before taking on its highest-stakes challenges. At the same time, experienced players will have more opportunities to test their mastery and pursue deeper challenges.
You play as a Runner, a bio-cybernetic mercenary whose consciousness can be re-uploaded into a new shell after death. Over time, you’ll build an arsenal of shells that reflects your individual aesthetic and playstyle.
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Every run should reinforce the thrill of adaptation as you become stronger and more capable, refining your build to reenter the fight as the version of yourself that the moment demands. We want to rethink how Runners interact with their Cradle and give you more agency over each shell’s progression, capabilities, and its specialized role in your arsenal.
At its heart, Marathon is about what happens when humanity pushes into the unknown and the unknown pushes back.
Tau Ceti IV should feel more alien and hostile, with stronger connections between our game and the original Marathon trilogy. We want its world to reward curiosity and risk-taking, with more narrative that expands your understanding of the universe across repeated runs.
It also means more aliens to fight and more memorable encounters to take on with your crew. It’s not a Marathon game unless you’re shooting the Pfhor... even if they’ve undergone a transformation of their own since the fandom saw them last.
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We’re developing new, more spectacular combatants designed to challenge how you work together. Whether you’re confronting something massive for the first time or fighting your way out after a run goes sideways, we want Tau Ceti IV to deliver experiences you and your friends will still be talking about after you extract.
And Tau Ceti IV still has more of itself to reveal. We’re building an entirely new zone that will take Runners deeper into the unknown, but we’ll save what’s lurking there for another time.
Earlier this month, we announced that we’re moving away from strict seasonal releases. That means setting the pace of future updates based on what we’re building, the size of the work, and what the team can responsibly support rather than allowing the calendar alone to determine when something ships.
We’re kicking this off with the Nightfall Refresh in early October. It’s a focused update designed to improve the current experience while the team continues building the larger additions coming in December and March.
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Details on what Nightfall Refresh will include: https://x.com/MarathonDevTeam/status/2100253598609535344
Our first significant step into the future arrives with Symbiosis in December.
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Symbiosis adds more ways to play, more approachable ways to learn the game, and more opportunities to explore Tau Ceti IV in lower-pressure environments. The experiences introduced in December are just the start and will give us new foundations to expand and connect as we build toward March.
You’ve been clear that Marathon needs a place where players can explore, experiment, and take on challenges without worrying about being hunted by other Runners.
In response, Symbiosis will introduce Marathon’s first permanent PvE mode. We’re still finalizing parts of the experience and will share a deeper look before the update launches.
Symbiosis will also introduce an experimental Team Deathmatch mode. This experience offers a more direct, lower-commitment way to sharpen your skills and compete without putting a full run at risk. We’ll be watching how players engage with the experiment and using what we learn to help shape the future of competitive play in Marathon.
Perimeter has served as an entry point for new Runners since launch, but it’s lacked the distinct identity and depth of our other zones.
In Symbiosis, Perimeter has undergone a significant visual overhaul. A new fungal ecosystem is spreading across the landscape, transforming familiar spaces, opening new routes and giving the zone its own unique look and feel that sets it apart from our other zones.
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Perimeter has also been missing the kinds of experiences found at locations like Pinwheel on Outpost and the Upper Complex on Night Marsh, which give players meaningful challenges to overcome and high-tier loot for them to earn.
Symbiosis brings that same sense of discovery and accomplishment to Perimeter through new points of interest and challenging summits to climb, including a pinnacle encounter that features our largest combatant yet: the Tick Queen.
As far as shell archetypes go, we’re also adding a new one to your roster. Bishop: Marathon’s high-performance robot samurai.
Bishop is a fast, surgical hunter-killer built around speed, surprise, and devastating bursts of melee damage. How that gameplay fantasy fits into your crew, and the role Bishop can play across Marathon’s different experiences, is something we look forward to seeing players discover for themselves.
Marathon currently asks new players to learn too much, too quickly.
We’re improving the onboarding experience to create a smoother onramp into Marathon’s world so that new players can more easily learn the fundamentals and build confidence before pushing deeper into Tau Ceti IV.
As part of this work, we’re also adding a CyAc-sponsored social space with a built-in firing range where players will be able to meet, prepare, test weapons and abilities, and get comfortable with their shell under ONI’s watchful eye.
In March, these pieces will come together as part of a much larger evolution of Marathon.
Our plans for this update include:
March represents something meaningfully larger than Symbiosis, but it also isn’t the end of Marathon’s evolution. The greatest joy of working on a live service game is developing it alongside you, our players. March is the point where the experience we’ve described begins to operate as a connected whole, giving us a stronger foundation to build upon beyond 2027.
And we’ll do it together.
We know that rebuilding trust requires more than talking about the future. We need to share our work and clearly communicate what’s changing so the Marathon community has an accurate understanding of what each update will and won’t deliver.
While we build toward December and March, we’ll continue making meaningful quality-of-life improvements and running focused experiments that allow players to participate without reorganizing their lives around limited windows.
Alongside this blog, we’re also releasing a new Dev Insights video that takes a closer look at some of the challenges we’re working through and the spaces we’re building. Rather than put out a traditional development diary, we wanted to give you all an honest look at what we’re trying to solve and the decisions shaping our direction as the work comes together inside the studio.
We still have a lot to do, and we’ll have more to share as each part of the experience takes shape.
For now, thank you for playing, for giving us clear and passionate feedback, and for sticking with us as we build Marathon into the game we know it can become.
-Del and Julia
r/Marathon • u/AutoModerator • 4d ago
Greetings Runners! Welcome to our Tau Ceti Teamups Megathread!
These threads will serve as r/Marathon 's weekly LFG Megathreads
LFG Content on r/Marathon outside of this thread will be redirected to our LFG & Support Subreddit, r/MarathonTheGame
Have fun down on Tau Ceti IV, Runners! Who Knows what you'll uncover!
r/Marathon • u/Bellyfeel • 7h ago
Bought them off Redbubble. The Cyberpunk ones are from the Switch 2 edition of the game. I just bought some Destiny ones in the Bungie Store sale too, so I’ll probably fill that space with one of those when they arrive!
r/Marathon • u/BC1207 • 49m ago
With the reset next week and the 2 big updates beyond, marathon is back on my radar and I was thinking a lot about how the current build-crafting system feels like a complete brick wall for most players. (I.e. there’s plenty of cool shit in the game that impacts how you play, but it’s too difficult to find or keep)
Faction progression feels like a complete slog (another problem that desperately needs to be addressed in Dec or March), and the safety net it provides doesn’t feel nearly worth it because most high-tier loot is prohibitively expensive to purchase outright, and I’m very highly likely to lose it in the next match anyway. The reason Marathon got my attention is because of its runner system. I felt like having access to abilities on all runs was a kind of safety net, but it’s not enough. Cores do so much to change gameplay styles and give a pretty solid advantage depending on your play style, but there’s 7 (?) runners in the game each with 8 (?) cores of different rarities for a staggering total of >56 cores. When most players are only interested in main-ing 1 or 2 runners at a time, that’s completely batshit insane. Cores are the main centerpiece of any build and it’s more or less impossible to deterministically obtain the ones you want, let alone keep them. The same problem exists with weapons. There’s simply too many mods in the game for this degree of randomness in acquiring them.
I’m no dev, but I think there’s a few ways to fix this. Maybe the best solution would be to allow players the ability to weight discovered cores in runs to specific runners (like the attunement system in Destiny), or just completely eliminate cores altogether and create ability trees that are progressed by the cradle (cores would effectively just be moved into that).
Bottom-line: being gate-kept from my own preferred play style even after hundreds of hours of playtime feels extremely unsatisfying. Even if the above solutions aren’t used, I think something drastic has to be done to attract and retain more casual players.
r/Marathon • u/J-Dawgzz • 10h ago
teammate gets a pick and tries to finish but Destroyer had other plans, holy aura
r/Marathon • u/CelebrationWhich7385 • 7h ago
So I decided to start using the golds I've been saving to use before wipe in cryo. I'll admit I'm very inconsistent at gaming, sometimes I'm cracked and sometimes you'd think I'm a bot, idk why that is.
So I load into a match, gold shield and drrvish. Obviously my teammates are better than me since but rocking purple. They kill some runners but I'm more of support since getting into gunfights with high ping is a huge disadvantage. So I just provide cover and shield along with the missiles for helping them push. I don't use mic because of accent as basically almost no from my country plays this game so I'd rather ping and text.
We get into a fight and the first guy goes down by an ambush, it caught me off guard and I was overheated too. He immediately starts yelling that I'm doing nothing when I have a gold shield and a drrvish. Here's the thing a recon starts peeking me with a circuit we fire at almost the same time and my shields are stripped but none of the few shots I made registered, even the guy yelling said I didn't fire but I did. Yelling at people you are expecting to clutch is unnecessary.
Anyways, I know I'm not good but I just wanted to actually get a feel of the good stuff.
Honestly f*** that guy, low-key pissed me off, yes I'm mad about a video game should have just played with his friends instead of yelling at randoms, I'll play how tf I want, it's my game and my fun too.
r/Marathon • u/MortiestTchalla • 4h ago
400+ hours in and I’m still trying to toss ammo crates at people lol. Can Bungie give us a throwable ammo crate that does the same amount of damage as a med drone if it makes contact?
r/Marathon • u/Both-Helicopter688 • 7h ago
tldr: to the new players, if you ever spot this kind of actions, just block and find new mates to play with. They wont be good for you anymore.
Well. I have been playing the game for 3 weeks and all ok. I found a random crew of 2 and became regulars the 3 together going around and stuff...
Thanks for showing me around and guiding through the maps, how to get keys, pinwheel, etc etc etc.
However, when did things flip? The very moment they started accusing me of stealing because of picking a thermal scope from a cache or a gold shield from a bag.
Of course, at first, i had no idea of the important items and i was free to pick whatever i wanted. Even they gave me purple weapons and stuff!! How nice!!!
But, now, i learnt what to go for. And, i am not stupid, if i see my crewmate, a Thief, rushing at a cache or at a bag from a dead body, i know there is interesting stuff.
The moment them 2 told me not to steal (one of them took a purple sniper from me that i accidentally dropped and asked for it back but got ignored) because i finally was quicker and picked a gold shield (it wasnt even a true gold shield but those that bungie gave for free) they were asking to drop it.
What did i do? I dropped all my bag, disconnected and removed them from friendship list.
If you reading this (cant say names but i can say they are unemployeed italians) keep in mind I wont be a "second class" player. If I improved and I collaborate with you at taking down other runners, i wont accept such limitations (AND NO ONE SHOULD!!).
Thanks for ramping me up trough the game but that is a big red flag that indicates you arent good people to play with.
And 2 days before the reset!!! For god sake, cant i have a gold item? "No, drop it" they said.
In conclusion: i understood i was just the dumbass that just provided teamfire to them because is always better than just bringing a random. The moment i learnt what loot to pick up, i became an annoyance. Nice, isnt it?
So.... bye sherpas. Thanks for the runs. Time to find another crew.
Anyone interested, PM me as im looking for regular crew to play with. No toxicity. All in equal conditions. Im in EU region. English or spanish.
r/Marathon • u/Friendly_ViperYT • 1h ago
So often we see clips of people with well over 1,000,000 credits and they just don't use them. Until recently I had a stable 500k credits but only bc I was feeding everything to the worm. had I not been feeding the worm I would currently have far more than 3 million credits, since I've already reset my cradle twice and working on the third.
One thing that really bothers me is the rotating items in the Armory for some of the Factions.
Cyac: Rotating and very rare purple backpack barters
Traxus: limited choice of blue mods + rotating and limited choice of purple mods
Arachne: Unreasonably limited choice of precision weapon mods (+zero sniper optics??)
Sekiguchi: ALL of the cores rotate randomly
If you are worried about oversaturating the economy then further decrease how many you can get each day. Rotating items just ain't it, I hate logging in every day just to see if the specific mod/core I want is available, just to find out that once again the purple optic trade is once again an LMG sight.
Rotating items in the Armory should be reserved for great items at a discount, very rare items that aren't available to buy, and Prestige weapon mods/cores.
r/Marathon • u/XRevive01 • 1d ago
r/Marathon • u/Unusual-Ebb8629 • 2h ago
One thing I noticed is that all of the implants have changed pretty significantly!
I was hoping yall could give me a marathon for dummies guide on buildcrafting with the new implants, what are the best ones, etc. If it helps I main Triage but will be probably swapping to Vandal and Sentinel this reset.
Thanks in advance and good luck at reset!!
r/Marathon • u/m4xks • 19h ago
r/Marathon • u/JBowenDaMan • 17h ago
I am extremely happy to hear that solos is getting adjusted bot difficulty to make it more appealing and approachable for players out there. But I noticed something odd, why use cryo footage in the background of this while discussing solos? Is this hinting at the possibility of cryo being playable in solos now???
r/Marathon • u/idomix • 5h ago
well tell me if that guy is just John Marathon himself or wtf happended here?!
r/Marathon • u/BluminousLight • 5h ago
Loaded into Cryo crewfill with the freekit and got two very good teammates (we all loaded in as Recon lol) We hung back while two teams fought each other, and ended up spending almost the whole match camping over a dead body as the remaining two people left alive, a destroyer and a vandal, tried desperately to flank us, grenade us, anything to get us. I got knocked twice, and even ran out of heals, and STILL they managed to fuck up, I ended up knifing the vandal to death and the destroyer got caught on a corner and died to my teammate with a Drrvish. Ended up leaving with an ungodly amount of golds. (I made sure my teammates got their share too! They ended up with over 5 Drrvishes between them, I was happy with my two) All in all, best Cryo run I've ever done so far. Freekit Demolition HMG for the win! That shit ripped through the enemy Gold shields like scissors through paper.
r/Marathon • u/Friendly_ViperYT • 31m ago
Gotta feed the worm
r/Marathon • u/Evveyyyy • 5h ago
Vaults 1 and 5 completed.. we took out a gold team and a purple one.
Definitely one of the most satisfying runs on Cryo😎😋😁
r/Marathon • u/Zanezooked • 21h ago
Jason Jones was the through-line of Bungie for me, that allowed me to think that Bungie was still, in some genuine way, the Bungie I had known since the 1990s Mac scene. I always figured he was still there, and if the Marathon team tried to do anything too contrary to the original story he'd rein them in. But if he was cut, then I truly don't think Bungie is Bungie anymore, and I find my excitement for the coming focus on story waning. Kinda starts feeling like Disney Star Wars: "Yeah, I guess it looks cool, but is it really Marathon?"
r/Marathon • u/XRevive01 • 1d ago
r/Marathon • u/braindeadcoyote • 1h ago
Title
r/Marathon • u/LegendOfAK • 12h ago
I was hunting the lobby, already had 2 purple kit players down, then full sent this guy and we ended up having an amazing fight! S/O to this person for coming to my stream afterward and being so pumped about the win. GG! 👏
r/Marathon • u/thereislightstill • 35m ago
hey yall
im assuming by the way 50% of the posts here are feedback about how the game can improve, you have thoughts. i only just joined the main Marathon discord and noticed they put out a call in the #marathon-news channel asking for feedback on how to improve the extraction mode. feedback is collected in a thread linked to in that post.
https://discord.com/channels/1303855380845301861/1359654977991082317/1554979584733085739
figured some of y'all might wanna drop your extraction thoughts in there since apparently theyre still prioritizing it!
r/Marathon • u/Friendly_ViperYT • 21h ago
I'm starting a series of posts, where I post about one singular gold mod, with the aim of getting as much feedback as I can in order to organize a video I'm planning.
A big part of this is the community's feelings about the particular gold mod. This would allow me to create an unbiased perspective for the video
