Launch, Learnings, and What’s Next

There’s a lot of words ahead, but here’s the gist of it:  

• With the first season of Marathon we’ve created a strong core community.  

• We're embarking on a multi-season journey built around growing from the seed of this strong community. 

• We’re looking to solve some pain points for players: 

  • Making the game less grindy, more rewarding 

  • Making improvements to things like the UI/UX, matchmaking, end game meta, playing as solos/duos, etc. 

  • Smoothing out onboarding 

• We’re also going to build out more of the core game: 

  • Adding new fun and mind-bending content: new and updated zones, Runner shells, new combatants, weapons, loot, and more 

  • Building systems to make progressing more interesting 

• We want to build more survival experiences for different moods, like if you want to full sweat or lean back and chill. 

  • Exploring more pure PVP, PVE, and PVP-lite experiences 

  • Continue experimenting with experimental queues to learn more around these experiences 
     

Other highlights: 

• We're bringing back Duos for Season 2 with a rotating Duos queue. 

• We're testing some experiments in Season 2 around PVE and PVP-Lite modes. 

• We’re expanding the max size of your Vault and increasing faction progression rates in Season 2. 

• We’ll talk more about Season 2 content like Night Marsh, the new Cradle progression system, and the Runner shell Sentinel, the week of May 25.  

If this summary has your interest piqued, read on below for more info on these topics. 

If this were a recording, this is where you'd hear me press play, the synth beats with the lulling hum of a playful but elusive baseline would collide with your eardrums and my voice would greet you with a warm and simple "Hello." So let's just imagine that's happening and get started... 

Nearly three months have passed since we've flung you across the stars and crash landed you onto the dangerous and mysterious lost colony on Tau Ceti IV. For the development team, myself, and all of the talented teams at Bungie and Sony that have been supporting us, it has been quite a wild ride. 

From launch to now, we've watched you tackle the challenges of Tau Ceti, learn to navigate its threats, discover new ways to engage with one another, and create infinite unique stories of survival. And through it all, we've been watching, listening, and trying new things in an effort to learn more about you all. 

As we come closer to the end of our first season and the subsequent start of Season 2, we wanted to take some time to reflect on the learnings of Season 1 and how that informs our thoughts about what we want to achieve as we build future seasons.  

So please come take a walk with us as we reflect a bit on Marathon. 

Marathon’s roots go back to the original trilogy of the 90s, where you, as a lone security officer, defend a colony ship above the distant planet Tau Ceti IV. Your fight for survival begins a long journey of discovery in which you learn about ancient alien races, the dangers of AI evolution and "rampancy," and the complex nature of dimensional reality, among many other themes. 

When we started thinking about making a new survival-based experience, the world of Marathon was, for us, the perfect backdrop. Being on the edge of space where you are alone, separated from the comfort of proximity to Earth and the Solar System, and confronted with a whole new environment where the rules around physics and reality are challenged, felt like the right environment to create a game that asks you to learn, adapt, and overcome new dangers in intriguing and mind-bending ways. 

As we moved towards bringing those ideas to life, we brought together a team to make a social survival experience, one built around a few core concepts and themes: 

1. Everything is potentially dangerous: Create an environment where everything is a hazard or threat. This includes fauna and flora indigenous to the planet, weather patterns, NPC enemies, and other players.  

2. Preparing is important: Feel high value in bringing and utilizing the right resources for the problems you encounter.  

3. Every run moves you forward: Ensure every run feels like it's pushing you forward, raising the floor on your possibilities.  

4. Bigger risk, bigger reward: Create an environment where you can take on more risk of death to gain better rewards.  

5. Use your judgment: Focus on open-ended decisions. Let players tackle challenges in open-ended ways. Fight, flee, and evade based on your judgment of the scenario. Create loose alliances, compete to gain resources for your own betterment, or wait out the battles and scavenge the field.

6. Surviving matters: Prompt players to consider survival as the core win condition and ensure that living feels successful.  

Building on these concepts, we constructed the game around high-impact decisions, feeling the push and pull of making a game that felt too complex, confusing, and punishing versus one that felt learnable and punishing enough to keep survival as its central theme. We iterated with expanding groups of players, making shifts in our core gameplay and features as we got feedback through our tests. 

In the end, we landed on a game where we felt we had achieved a balance in which we were provoking players to learn, take risks, feel the glory of successfully surviving, and the tragedy of catastrophic failure, all in the pursuit of creating compelling stories of traversing the mysterious and dangerous environment on an alien planet.  

And then we put that game in a cannon and launched it out into the world beyond us... 

Out of the gate, it was exciting to see the core community build around the tense survival experience we created. The sheer number of stories the community has shared of their moments running across the planet, battling the UESC, getting into heated fights with other Runners, and yes, sometimes dying to the errant tick nest or poison plant, were overwhelmingly inspiring. 

The love we've seen for the world we've created has been unimaginably exciting as well. Fanart, lore videos, video edits, and music shares have become a common staple of our internal chats. For all this and more, we are highly thankful for the community that has come to join us for this first season. You are the reason we do this, and our gratitude for all of you cannot be expressed enough. 

Throughout Season 1, we've also been building a lot of muscle to deliver a more responsive and iterative live game to match the pace at which players have been playing.  

• We launched Cryo Archive, our first endgame map, and Ranked Mode. 

• We launched our experimental queue, including experiments around Duos and Sponsored Kit queues.  

• We've tackled a variety of balance patches and hotfixes as we've seen problems in the live game.  

• We launched the mid-season C.A.R.R.I. initiative focused on playing with and against others in new ways.  
   

With each release, we've been learning and getting better at understanding the needs of our live game operations and upgrading where we've seen opportunities. But as many of you know, Season 1 has not been without some hiccups and challenges, so let's discuss these a bit. 

Where do we start? Developing a new game is always a challenge, and creating a live game in 2026 is no simple effort. There are millions of moving parts to a game, especially a player-driven and systems-dense game such as Marathon. Let's start at a high level with some themes we've observed around the Marathon game and community. 
 

1.  Marathon is overwhelming to learn.  

Marathon for new players can be an overwhelming experience. After a short tutorial, you're often thrown into the fire to learn a lot of concepts, navigate a lot of screens, filter through a ton of loot, and build muscle memory with a lot of mechanics fairly quickly in a hostile environment where other players can bring you down and take your stuff. 

2.  It's easy to hit a wall if you're not spending lots of time, don't have a consistent crew, or are not super skilled.  

Matches can feel like a death spiral for some players. You kit up, you go in, you die to a spawn rush, or someone gets the jump on you as you're looting. Faction progress can feel like a slog, and you struggle to get mats and credits out to upgrade. You rarely get out of that loop, and the endgame of Cryo can feel so far away as you inch your way forward in the precious hours you have to play every week. And doing it solo just makes it all harder... 

3.  Still figuring out the balance mix of the endgame. 

Bubbles, ‘nade spam, and snipers can make it feel like every engagement at the endgame, with all the stuff everyone has accumulated, is chaotic, fast, and stressful in a bad way. Taking time to make important tactical decisions can feel like a luxury. Spawn rushing and lobby clearing are dominant strategies that pull the pacing too far and make matches too predictable. Matchmaking can be a blessing or a curse. 

4.  Sometimes you don't want to sweat.  

Gripping your precious loot every moment as you creep your way to the exfil while spinning your head around like a chicken to make sure another Runner doesn't drop on top of you with a shotgun is a fun and intense experience. But after a few runs of that, sometimes you need to power down and just want to frag out or relax and play a different way. It's hard to find that chill moment in Marathon. 

As we’ve been learning these lessons, we’ve also been experimenting and observing some additional areas to help us explore avenues to improve Marathon: 

1. Sponsored Marsh / Perimeter are helpful to create a more chill environment to play, especially if you've just been stomped or want to focus on getting some quests done over duking it out for loot. A lot of people have been playing the Sponsored Kit queues, and we're excited to see how it helps the overall loop of economic gain and progression. 

2. Sponsored Kits can be a good way to up the floor over the season and help recovery. Escalating from lower-end kits to middle-end kits over the season can make it easier to get back into the fight, especially for players who play less. 

3. Our matchmaking systems need different dimensions. In Season 1, they were focused on making sure players with less experience and knowledge were being kept away from those with more. This resulted in some good, which is newer players being protected for longer, and some bad, which is some unfortunate small pooling happening in the later parts of the season. The result was a constant battle we fought between match quality and queue times. 

4. We need to be careful with how many queues we're running. Throughout the season we added more queues which inevitably split the population more and led to some increased queue times. As we go into future seasons, we want to be more judicious with how we handle the amount of queues better. 

We've been absorbing so much over this season thanks to feedback, research, and play data from you all. It makes our heads spin sometimes. We're dizzy with it. But learning is just the first step to improvement, so let's discuss what we're planning next. 

When we were bringing Marathon out for players, our aspiration started with a simple statement: We want players to experience the thrill and danger of surviving on the edge of the explored universe. Our plan is to commit to that mission by both going deeper and expanding on that definition. 

To that end we have two main paths we're walking down starting with Season 2: 

A BETTER SEAT-GRIPPING EXPERIENCE WITH MORE MIND BENDING SCI-FI: 

First and foremost, we want to continue to evolve the challenging and tense experience that our players have come to love while leaning further into the wild world we've created.  

We want to build on it with new content and systems that challenge you in new ways to grow, collaborate, and compete with one another in your quest to thrive in Tau Ceti’s deadly environments. New zones, zone changes and variants, new shells, new weapons, new equipment, and loot galore. New systems that change how you progress in a season. New contracts that add to the journey of exploration and gaining favor with the factions. And changes to parts of the game that meaningfully help you reexamine what you already know.  

In Season 2 we'll be starting that journey with some things we'll be adding to the mix, including a new dimension of challenge with Night Marsh, a new defensive Runner shell Sentinel, new weapons and equipment, a revamp to how you acquire Runner shell stats to give you more options with the Cradle, and increased progression rates for faction and Runner levels. 

Beyond Season 2, we're working on some interesting ideas that will help to escalate the game and bring new areas of Tau Ceti to life. As we develop this new content, we’re focusing on how we bring new and interesting challenges to the game for both veterans and newcomers alike. Just a note, these ideas are in development, and so in the interest of transparency, we're going to enumerate them below but they'll likely take better shape and change as we learn more over Season 2. 

• A new zone that leans into more alien elements and mind warping debuffs. 

• New enemies from Tau Ceti and beyond, big and small alike. 

• New weapons that fill out the battery side of the arsenal. 

• New ways to exfil that create interesting tradeoffs between how much loot you carry versus how safe they are. 

We’re also dedicating a strong effort to smoothing out the experience and solving issues we already see, as well as any new issues that arise, in a quick and responsive manner. This includes not only balance changes and improvements to the user experience, but also ensuring you can find good value in playing a little as well as playing a lot, and that you can better find the right challenges for your gear and skill level as you grow in the game. 

• In Season 2, we’ll be adding a Duos rotating zone queue. 

• In Season 2, we’ll be adding a new matchmaking system that helps players find better quality matches with more flex for higher-end players. 

• In Season 2, we’ll be expanding the max size of your Vault. 

• For Season 2 and beyond, we're working on a set of UX improvements to help make setting goals and getting into a match smoother. 

• For Season 3 and beyond, we’re working on improving our onboarding experience to make it less overwhelming for new players.  

• For Season 3 and beyond, we’ll be making changes to the contract system to improve how you interact with Priority and other contracts. 

MORE OPTIONS TO CHILL AND NEW SURVIVAL EXPERIENCES:  

The second theme is about how we want to evolve Marathon as a whole to be an experience where you can find more novel ways to play when you're stressed out from a nail-biting run and just need to cool off or have fun without the stress. Options where you can go full sweat or lean back and chill. This means new ways to play that accommodate different friend groups, moods, and time availability to allow you to experience the thrilling survival of Tau Ceti in the way that fits your needs. 

• In Season 2, we will be experimenting with two modes, one at the beginning of the season and one towards the middle/latter half of the season. The experimental mode at the beginning of the season will focus more on PVE, but with a light touch of PVP. The second experimental mode will be a PVE-only mode that’s focused on crews being tasked with completing objectives together and making some progress across matches. 

• We’ll continue to run experimental queues beyond these two offerings for Season 2 and beyond, testing the waters around other mechanics (such as perhaps a more purely PVP-focused mode) with the potential for these to become part of the core game loop or permanent new ways to play. 

Big things coming down the line! So with all this talk about the future, let's wrap this up with one last reflection on this year-long journey we're going to take together. 

If this were a recording, this is where I'd pause the music and bring my hands together and stare thoughtfully off in the distance. I'd begin to say something, and then probably stop myself and take a few deep breaths before continuing.  

Today we're approaching the end of Season 1, but our eyes are on the road from here to beyond 2026 and into 2027 and our hands are working to pave that road as we speak. The journey ahead is one that will see the game expand in scope, depth, and breadth of what it has been for Season 1, all in the interest of bringing to life the vibrancy and passion that we have as a team for sharing our love of survival challenges with you all. 

To look more directly at our plans and goals for the next year: 

• Season 2 is on the horizon and we'll be sowing the seeds for a lot of our future plans via new content such as Sentinel and Night Marsh, systems, and experiments around new play modes that may become permanent in the future. 

• Season 3 we're planning to introduce a lot (and I mean a lot) of revisions to our early experience, including big updates to Perimeter, alongside a new Runner shell, and additional (no spoilers) content.  

• Season 4 we're focusing on building more depth into the existing extraction loop.  

• Season 5 we're looking at bringing the whole ecosystem of (PV(P)VE) play together and evolving our weird sci-fi world in new ways. 
   

For those of you who have joined us on this journey, we want to thank you. Your feedback, your endless support, and your passion have become the echoing chant that fuels us to conjure new ideas, create new solutions to problems, and have fun doing it. We're excited for you to join us as we grow this game around you and the community you've created. 

For those of you who may be on the fence about whether or not we're the right game for you: thank you as well. We're excited to welcome you when you're ready to take the dive so keep checking back in with us as we walk this journey and if you get the itch, we'll be more than happy to have you. 

Alright, this is where I hit the stop button. I've written a lot of words. Time to get back to work and turn words into releases. 

Thank you infinitely, 

--Joe.