I had my doubts when Sony said in November that Bungie's troubled extraction shooter Marathon 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, 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 came along and completely stole its thunder.
An exact date still hasn't been announced, but Marathon is "targeting" a price of $40/£40/€35, 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."
Also like Helldivers, Marathon's reward passes will not expire, and will remain available for purchase even after new passes come out—although to be fair, Helldivers lifted that idea from Halo Infinite.
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—and if you think that sounds a lot like Arc's free loadouts, 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.
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—leapers, bastions, queens etc.—which 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.
It's not a sprint
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.
"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."
Today's video also showcases Marathon's four zones (ie maps), three on the surface—Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost—and 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."
One of the biggest challenges facing Marathon is the widely held assumption that it's cooked right from the jump, a pre-conceived notion driven by the very visible rough ride Marathon has had so far. As PC Gamer's resident Destiny problem-haver Tim Clark wrote in his April take on the game, "I can't think of many games which have been freighted with more problems to solve: from a spooked Sony, to the inherently hostile nature of the genre, and Bungie's own chequered history with Destiny's live service model, monetisation, and especially PvP balancing."
Coupled with the rise of a very direct competitor that seems to have got it all right (yes, Arc Raiders), Marathon doesn't seem likely to have an easy go of it. But the studio will surely be hoping that there is now a mainstream audience with an appetite for and understanding of the extraction shooter genre that didn't exist earlier this year.
Judging by the initial reaction to today's video on YouTube, though, Bungie does seem to have at least moved in the right direction. Very generally, there's a sense that today's reveal of the many changes made to the game is dramatically better than the original reveal, and that's led to a genuine sense of excitement in a lot of replies. The eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games remains a bad habit that's tough to overcome, and I do still feel like a March release might be rushing it in order to prevent the game from sliding into Sony's next fiscal year. But maybe the truth is simpler: Maybe Bungie really is ready to surprise us.
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