{"id":1428237,"date":"2025-12-16T01:20:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T01:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/j5eTkwRosKY5kX9PzfG7qN"},"modified":"2025-12-16T01:20:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T01:20:13","slug":"bungie-takes-its-second-shot-at-revealing-marathon-40-price-tag-proximity-chat-solo-queue-and-march-release-confirmed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/bungie-takes-its-second-shot-at-revealing-marathon-40-price-tag-proximity-chat-solo-queue-and-march-release-confirmed\/","title":{"rendered":"Bungie takes its second shot at revealing Marathon: $40 price tag, proximity chat, solo queue, and March release confirmed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I had my doubts when Sony said in November that Bungie’s troubled extraction shooter Marathon<\/a> would be out in March 2026 come hell or high water, but it seems determined to prove me wrong. In a big update released today<\/a>, Bungie not only recommitted to the March ’26 launch but also revealed details on pricing, ‘Reward Passes,’ and the many ways the game has changed since Arc Raiders<\/a> came along and completely stole its thunder.<\/p>\n

An exact date still hasn’t been announced, but Marathon is “targeting” a price of $40\/\u00a340\/\u20ac35, putting it in line with big-time online shooters Helldivers 2 and Arc Raiders. “Purchasing Marathon will give you full access to the game, including a roadmap of free gameplay updates as the year progresses,” Bungie said. “This will include new maps, new Runner shells, events, and more, starting with the exploration of UESC Marathon’s Cryo Archive in Season 1.”<\/p>\n

Also like Helldivers, Marathon’s reward passes will not expire<\/a>, and will remain available for purchase even after new passes come out\u2014although to be fair, Helldivers lifted that idea from Halo Infinite<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Marathon’s more overt lifts, though, come straight from Arc Raiders. After saying in April that Marathon would not have proximity chat<\/a> because it’d be too toxic, Marathon will launch with proximity chat; plans to launch without a solo queue have also been jettisoned. Both changes felt pretty much inevitable, given how the hugely successful Arc Raiders has become a machine for both generating hilarious clips<\/a> of karmic justice and as a fascinating social experiment into player interaction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bungie has also added a new Runner shell called Rook, a limited loadout option that enables solo players to drop into matches in progress and scavenge loot without risking anything they’ve previously earned\u2014and if you think that sounds a lot like Arc’s free loadouts<\/a>, well, yes, that’s pretty much exactly what it is, although Marathon had similar “sponsor kits” available in its previous alpha so this is presumably more of an adjustment than a straight lift from Arc.<\/p>\n

For the record, I think these are all good ideas, but where Arc Raiders has really separated itself from Marathon is that the AI enemies are both extremely dangerous and worth looting. That wasn’t the case last time we played Marathon, but the devs in the video do talk up how their bots are now much deadlier and therefore play a bigger part of the game. (At this point I’m not prepared to take Bungie’s word on anything loot-related until the gear is in my stash.)<\/p>\n

In the footage, the Marathon enemies are all a mix of bipedal armed robots and hovering scanner drones. Notably absent was anything like the larger arc enemies\u2014leapers, bastions, queens etc.\u2014which make for such entertaining firefights in Embark’s game. I also couldn’t spot anything that looked like a backpack ‘safe pocket’ during the few times Marathon’s inventory menu was on screen. This feature, which is core to both Arc Raiders and Escape from Tarkov, enables players to protect one (or several) pieces of loot from being stolen on kill. It feels so core to the genre’s vibes, that it’d be very odd to omit it, so I’ve asked Bungie for clarification.<\/p>\n

It’s not a sprint<\/h2>\n

What isn’t in doubt is how much better Marathon now looks. Bungie’s commitment to the stark visual style remains, with the studio saying it is “doubling down on the dark, gritty, and grounded sci-fi world.” That covers a range of improvements from better environments and environmental storytelling to dead bodies that not only stick around but actually decay over time, which not only looks cool (I guess?) but also has a practical use.<\/p>\n

“You come into a room and you see a bunch of carnage, but you see one body is still pristine, you know that their killer is probably close and you are not safe,” art director Jasons Sussman explained. “If everybody is just messy goop, you’re probably okay.”<\/p>\n

Today’s video also showcases Marathon’s four zones (ie maps), three on the surface\u2014Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost\u2014and Cryo Archive, an end-game challenge set aboard the Marathon ship. “You’re going to run into basically every type of environmental threat you have faced before,” production director Emanuel Rosu says in the video. “You’re going to fight a who’s who of the highest-tier UESC units, and the UESC are there in this presence you haven’t seen before.”<\/p>\n

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