Bungie has revealed more about the way the seasonal model will work in its upcoming extraction shooter Marathon, including more info about what you can expect when the game’s first season arrives.
In a blog post on the official Marathon website, Bungie says that each of Marathon‘s seasons will last three months, and that seasons will introduce new features like Runner shells, gear, and zones, all of which will be free for all players.
Additionally, you’ll «start fresh each season with nothing to [your] name», but each season will feature its own mini-progression loop, and the seasonal model will also progress the overall narrative of Marathon, allowing you to discover more about «what happened to the lost colony and on the Marathon ship».
Bungie says it wants to instil a feeling of what it cheekily refers to as «$@%& it let’s ball», with players going all-out at the end of seasons in the knowledge that they’ll be losing everything they’ve accumulated over the course of the season soon anyway.
Progression resets won’t include achievements or «ways to express yourself», and your Marathon codex also won’t reset, because, as Bungie puts it, «unburying the secrets of Tau Ceti takes time». Faction contract progression will also be maintained between seasons.
Marathon‘s first season, Death Is the First Step (referred to as First Step by Bungie), will see players trying to find a way to board the UESC Marathon ship that orbits Tau Ceti, upon which a new zone, Cryo Archive, will be unlocked.
The second half of the season will see Ranked mode becoming available, as well as quality-of-life improvements, balance changes, and more. It’s looking like a pretty stacked launch period for Marathon, to say the least.
There’s a lot riding on Marathon‘s success. The game is set to launch in just a couple of days after a pretty hefty delay last year, which itself followed on from a scandal that saw Bungie acknowledging Marathon contained artwork stolen from an online artist.
We’ll get to find out whether Marathon can leave behind the specter of its troubled development when the game launches on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on March 5th. Stay tuned for more.
