Good News, Marathon fans, Bungie has released a Dev Insights detailing all the new content coming to Marathon in Season 2.
Season 2 begins on June 2, with a free week from June 2nd-9th, where the game will be free for all players. Now is your chance to invite your friends, or give the game a try if you haven’t already.
When Season 1 ends, all your vault and personalised setups will be reset, and you can find more information on how the reset works here.
New Zone: Dire Marsh (Night)
A brand new challenge awaits! There is a new zone in Dire Marsh that introduces new mechanics, enemies, and locations to explore. Compared to Day Marsh, it is much slower and plays more like a horror game rather than Day Marsh. You lose your senses, bringing a completely new element to the game.
The new zone brings new equipment designed for hunting and surviving:
- Flashlights are a new tool available to all Runners on Night Marsh.
- Vector rounds are a new mag type with tracers.
- Vector grenades illuminate the area.
- Darksight scopes highlight the environment around you for a brief period when you ADS.
- Signal Flares, which light up the environment.
Kill UESC to get their certs and hack into the Network Towers to gain access to their stockpile of gear. Gather Certs to open doors around the map, as even stronger loot is hidden behind them.
Dire Marsh and Night Marsh will be available at all times for the first week of the new season. After that, it will rotate with the others every 90 minutes.
As standard, you’ll be able to complete most of the Die Marsh contracts in each zone, but Night Marsh has some exclusive contracts.
New Runner Shell: Sentinel
Sentinel is a new shell that acts as a defender. Their primary ability is the Defender System, which deploys a laser that destroys incoming grenades and missiles.
Snare Mine is the Sentinel’s tactical ability that detonates into submunitions. It traps enemies and immobilises them.
Sentinel’s Passive trait is Castle Doctrine, which grants increases resistances after taking splash damage, as well as faster weapon handling for close-range weapons when you’re ganged up on.
Prey Tracker is Sentinel’s trait ability, which is a motion-tracking system that allows you to see moving targets on the radar.
New Gear
There is new gear coming in Season 2.
Weapons
KKV-9SD is a pistol SMG which has an extreme rate of fire. The KKV can also use the new folding-stick mod, which can be closed or opened depending on hip fire/ADS.
D54 Battle Pistol, which is a mix between the BR33 Volley Rifle and the BRRT SMG.
Rarities and Chips
There are 8 new chips in Season 2. However, a full list hasn’t been released yet. The current new mods are:
- Brain Freeze Chip: Precision downs and kills with this weapon create a small explosion that spreads Frost to nearby hostiles.
- Alarmist Chip: After aiming down sights for a brief duration, projectile impacts create a terrifying proximity drone alert.
- Scrapyard Chip: Defeating hostiles with this weapon has a chance to spawn depleted heal items or standard materials.
Implants
Implants were confusing in Season 1, so they’re now defined by their perk first, and all have fixed stats. These Implants are split between Head, Torso, and Legs and are ranked by tier.
New System: The Cradle
The Cradle is a new system coming in Season 2 that will help you improve your Runner Shell as the season progresses. You’ll be able to convert your weapons, equipment and other items into XP for the Cradle. Levelling up the Cradle will earn Energy, which you can allocate to any of the categories.
Your Cradle progression resets at the start of the new season and is shared across all Runner Shells.
You can rearrange your Energy at any time and change things up. You can prioritise what you want.
Faction Progression and Contracts
There are some QoL changes to make progression simpler and make progress easier. This includes:
- Reducing the time necessary to reach VIP.
- Standard Contracts will grant more faction reputation
- More ways to earn reputation
Contract Changes
Bungie is adjusting contracts so they no longer feel like blockers. They are trying to make completing them more enjoyable and more organic, and less linear.
- Priority Contracts will be more focused on granting loot rewards rather than being hard requirements for reputation.
- Priority Contracts are also no longer gated behind faction reputation levels.
Ranked and Queues
In Season 2, Duo Queue will be added with rotating daily queues for Perimeter, Dire Marsh, Night Marsh, and Outpost.
Ranked will return on June 14, and you should make progression slightly easier this time around.
Ranked will be simpler moving forward, and low and high-stakes modes will be combined to reduce matchmaking times.
Cryo Archive Returns on June 11
Cryo Archive will remain on rotation during Season 2. Any progress you unlocked during S1 will carry over to Season 2.
QoL changes
In addition to all of these changes, we also have a bunch of QoL updates coming in Season 2, with more to come as the season progresses.
- Increased Vault space: a fully upgraded Vault can now hold up to 512 grid spaces of items.
- Added the ability to batch select items in your Vault.
- Added a loot filter where if you select a slot you’re missing on your loadout, it’ll filter only the loot you can equip in that slot.
- Simplified and streamlined the lobby UI, so that you can get into a run faster and more intuitively. This includes combining the Loadout and Vault menus.
- Players can access select UI screens during matchmaking, including factions, the Codex, settings, and more.
- Added new PC and console cursor speed settings.
- Added new privacy settings with name obfuscation and a matchmaking timer offset.
- Additional game security features to speed up detection of cheats and reduce their effectiveness.
- Implemented a round of CPU performance improvements, as well as adding support for frame generation on PC. Performance optimization is an ongoing priority for us, and we anticipate further improvements in future updates.
- Improvements to our network technology to reduce the rate of disconnections, particularly for players outside the United States.
