Marathon’s set to see how well it can cater to folks who only have one friend, with Bungie having announced plans to add an experimental duos mode to the extraction shooter. It’ll stick around for two weeks or so, be “a bit jank”, and hopefully give the studio a firm idea of whether they should put resources into developing a fully fleshed-out version of paired play going forwards.
As announced by Marathon game director Joe Ziegler, the duos experiment’s set to kick off on March 18th at 5PM GMT / 1PM ET / 10AM PT, running solely on the Perimeter map. You’ll get into it by hitting “Perimeter – Duo” when you get to the zone select screen, and you’ll need to already have set up a group with you and a preferred partner, since the matchmaking isn’t set up to handle putting solo players into pairs at this point.
The experimental mode’ll stick around for a maximum of two weeks, with Bungie potentially pulling it earlier than that or letting it run longer “depending on what’s going on”. Ziegler also warned that “some things will be a bit jank”. “This is a bit of an experimental feature so we expect to learn some things along the way and make changes to future versions of this,” he continued. “This likely won’t be the final implementation of how it would look and flow in the game, but for now it was [the] easiest way for us to get it to you all to help us test.
“Pending what we learn, we’re hoping to expand duos as a queue in the future and we wanted to take this first step sooner than later so we could understand how it affects our game better before investing a lot more time in fleshing out the feature.” The director also teased that more feature experimentation along these lines will likely happen to Marathon going forwards.
Bungie’s shooter’s far from the first game to dip its toes into the duo mode water post-release in response to players crying out for the chance to pair up. Elden Ring Nightreign did the same thing last year. Given the potential for such an addition to have unforseen consequences for the likes of matchmaking times and loot distribution, it’s good to see Bungie taking time to work out the kinks or at least properly gauge whether it’s worth taking the time to do so.
In the meantime, they’re trucking on with regular updates, with this week’s set to help hoarders clear out more space through clever stackage. If this duos news has you fancying trying the shooter for the first time, you can check out out handy tips for beginners.
