In its latest videogame-themed, AI-generated meme, the official White House X account has published a Destiny 2 character sheet featuring an unrealistically ripped Donald Trump wielding a Gjallarhorn.

"Eyes up, Guardians," reads the official tweet. In the image itself, a muscular, Duke Nukem-esque Donald Trump wields the United States flag against a backdrop of fighter jets and a Rolls Royce. In a piece of blunt-edged state propaganda that would have Edward Bernays rolling in his grave, Trump bears a power level of 4700 (the max in actual Destiny 2 is 550, for what it's worth) and is equipped with a B2 Bomber companion, which costs "over $2 billion" per unit and was most recently deployed in America's attack on Iran.

The White House and its departments have been issuing videogame-themed, AI-generated propaganda for years now. Earlier today Homeland Security riffed on the cover art for The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker to celebrate the US Coast Guard. Secretary Brooke Rollins riffed on GTA 6 in a recent video. The Department of Labor and The United States Customs and Border Protection have both taken a swing at GTA 6 as well. And those are just examples from the last seven days.

As Andy Chalk reported in March, the White House issued a spray of videogame-themed AI propaganda to promote its attack on Iran.

While none are subtle, or examples of great statesmanship, the White House's latest is especially poorly timed: today Washington-based Bungie announced sweeping layoffs. Sony executive Hermen Hulst said the layoffs would affect "a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members." With that context added, it looks very much like the president of the United States is mocking hundreds of now out-of-work developers.

That, or the White House's meme was devised before these layoffs were announced —Destiny 2 is experiencing a bittersweet renaissance at the moment—but that would only make it slightly less deranged. And it's hard to tell who this meme is meant to appeal to, save for the kind of person who pays Elon Musk at least $3 a month for a meaningless blue tick next to their name.

Whichever is true, It's just another example of the United States government's nightmarish slip into malevolent parody. Developers have responded to the disposal of "generational talent" with far more tact.

The other shoe has dropped. Following Destiny 2's last major update and widespread reports that Bungie was preparing for mass layoffs, Sony and the studio announced a "reduction in force" that includes most of the people who were working on Destiny 2, as well as several on the Marathon team and external contractors.

Exact numbers have not been given by Sony, but a required WARN notice issued by the studio says 292 positions were affected in Washington, where Bungie is headquartered (as spotted by GameFile's Stephen Totilo). That number does not include external or remote workers who were affected, so the real total is likely much higher. It's a bloodbath.

Despite Sony conveniently timing these layoffs on the same day GTA 6 pre-orders started, the gutting of one of the most storied and talented studios of the 21st century is all that people are talking about. Reactions across the hobby have included anger, sadness, and whatever you want to make of this official White House tweet. As is the way with this seemingly never-ending cycle of layoffs, we're also hearing from many of the employees affected by the layoffs, with many posts illustrating just how devastating this downsizing actually is.

Sandbox

Cinematics

The entire Cinematic org was included. Let me know if you're looking to pick up a Director and/or other talented cine folks at any level.

— @johnebenger.bsky.social (@johnebenger.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T22:50:58.907Z

Raid and dungeons

Engineering

VFX

Art

Quality Assurance

Community

On the Marathon team, developer Biru Jones, who contributed to the extraction shooter's powerful sound design, said they were let go.

Among the layoffs are longtime Bungie veterans like test lead Dawn Vu, who was about to celebrate 14 years working on Destiny.

"Generational talent just gone," wrote Bungie alum Ben Platnick. "These people were veterans from the Halo days."

In a statement issued today, CEO of Sony's Studio Business Group Herman Hulst said "most of the Destiny team" and "some Marathon team members" are gone, but noted that Bungie remains committed to supporting Marathon and future projects.

That rationale isn't going down smoothly with longtime fans, nor the folks who've been playing and covering Destiny for as long as it's existed.

I know Bungie is just the latest example of studio layoffs/closures shoveling skilled and hirable people into an industry that is catching them with a teaspoon, but it really is flabbergasting to see perhaps the best sci-fi audio/visual + gunplay artists In The World jettisoned by failed management.

— @woodwould.bsky.social (@woodwould.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T22:50:58.845Z

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Bungie has announced a "reduction in force" as it reorganizes following the end of development on Destiny 2, saying that with its premiere game now ended and new projects still in very early stages of development, "we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size."

"We know this decision has a profound impact on the people affected, their families, friends, and teammates," Bungie wrote in an unattributed message. "While these changes are necessary to best position the studio now and for the future, that does not lessen the difficulty of this moment or the impact it has on those affected."

Hermen Hulst, the CEO of Sony's Studio Business Group, released his own statement on the layoffs, indicating that the cuts run deep: Layoffs will impact "a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members."

"Over the past several months, together with Bungie leadership, we reviewed the studio’s long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy," Hulst wrote. "We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio’s resources with its current priorities and long-term goals."

Hulst said "Marathon remains an important part of our portfolio," and said Sony will continue to support Bungie's "team as they build on the strong foundation established in Season 1 and 2, and as they work on incubation efforts for future projects."

Bungie's message actually begins by acknowledging that "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years," and that's undeniably true. The game has stumbled from one botch to another in recent years, angering and shedding fans, and leading our top Destiny men, Tim Clark and Phil Savage, to each express doubts about the game's future.

The irony is that, with Destiny 2 now concluded, it's putting up fantastic player numbers on Steam. Some of that is no doubt the result of people dropping in for a jolt of nostalgia or perhaps a final farewell, but it's also hard not to see it as evidence that there's a good game underneath all of Bungie's headless flailing, and that people want to play it.

Sony's decision to pull the plug on Destiny 2 instead of properly fixing it is baffling, particularly given its commitment—for now—to Marathon, which is currently pulling a small fraction of the Steam player counts that Destiny 2 is. Marathon is not free, which is no doubt a factor in that, but it's a live service game nonetheless. It's no doubt less expensive to operate than Destiny 2, with considerably less new content in each new season, but it still requires ongoing development resources that could have otherwise been directed elsewhere.

And while Hulst has committed to Bungie's future through Marathon and new projects, I can't help wondering if maybe this is the real beginning of the end. It's a situation that reminds me very much of BioWare, whose future feels very much in doubt even as it's ostensibly working on Mass Effect 4.

Bungie didn't say how many people were let go as a result of the layoffs, but said it will share more about its future plans later.

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Destiny 2 has reached the end of the line: The final update is live, TWIDs are over, and we're all left wondering how the one-time king of live service shooters has come to such ignominious ruin. Even Destiny's competitors are baffled by Sony's decision to pull the plug, although some say Sony's not the real villain here at all. If there is a villain, besides Bungie management—which I think we can all agree has been pretty consistently not great—one thing's for sure: It's not Destiny players.

That bit of reassurance came from Bungie communications lead Dylan Gafner, better known to players as dmg04, in response to a Destiny 2 streamer who wondered whether they'd "done enough to try and help the situation," and if there was somehow more they could do.

"'Could I do more?'" Gafner replied rhetorically (via GamesRadar). "You all have done more for this game and our studio than could ever be imagined, and no words can accurately depict how lucky we are to have shared these worlds with you.

"Don't blame yourselves or think you could have / should have done more. This is just the way it goes sometimes."

It's fair to say that Bungie has sometimes had a bit of a rocky relationship with some of the more rabid Destiny 2 player base. Bungie whiffed on Destiny 2 in many and various ways over the years—here's us explaining "why Destiny 2 players got so angry," in 2017—but the backlash from some in the community could be beyond the pale.

In 2022, Gafner wrote on Reddit that persistent abuse and threats against Bungie employees had resulted in "reduced communications as the team plans future protections/strategies to help avoid these sorts of things," which eventually led to the creation of the anonymized Destiny 2 Team social media account. In 2023, after winning a $500,000 legal action against a particularly abusive player, Bungie warned that Destiny 2 developers were still being harassed by members of the community simply because they worked at the studio.

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But, as with so many things in life, the worst of the noise came from a small number of players—the vast majority, while sometimes unhappy with one aspect of Destiny 2 or another, focused their frustrations through a lens of respect, appreciation, and love. Despite the rough patches, that's clearly what's settled in with Gafner.

"No matter the future, we will always have these memories," Gafner concluded. "Thank you. For everything."

I love the look of Marathon, and I like shooters in general. But extraction shooters? Not so much. I'm not very good at them, for one thing, and the constant pressure to get out with your loot before the timer hits zero is a huge drag. So when Bungie said it was looking at PvE modes for Marathon, you bet my ears perked up.

The experimental Sponsored Survival mode introduced earlier this month sounded potentially interesting but not quite what I was after. But the new, full-on PvE Vault Breaker mode revealed today? Yeah, that might be it.

Vault Breaker enables players to venture into Marathon's raid map, Cryo Archive, solo, in duos or trios, to take on a series of increasingly challenging vaults. The mode will have its own unique progression mechanic that enables players to increase in power across multiple matches, until they reach the final vault "and the mysterious entity within."

The new mode will require a special "Sponsored Kit"—one of Marathon's free loadouts—to access, presumably to maintain some semblance of gameplay balance. The bigger twist, though, is that Vault Breaker eschews one of the most fundamental aspects of extraction shooters: Any gear or items you find in the mode will be left behind when you leave. The only thing you'll take with you Vault Data, a new currency that can be used to upgrade your Vault Breaker Sponsored Kit, or to purchase gear that can be used in other modes.

Bungie said eliminating gear extraction will let players "experience Cryo Archive without flooding the economy with low-risk, high-power Cryo loot," which seems reasonable to me. But it's drawn something of a mixed reaction among the PC Gamer crew. Notorious Destiny freak Tim Clark called it a huge mistake, declaring that "not keeping the stuff you find is anathema to me," while FPS guy Morgan Park saw it in a very different light, saying it "sounds like a fun way to learn the map" without getting your ass shot off by people who already know it inside and out. Lincoln Carpenter, ever the voice of reason, said it "seems fine."

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For myself, I'm actually pretty excited. This is where I finally start paying Marathon: I have even less interest in the loot grind than I do in not having my ass shot off by people who already know the game inside and out, so a mode that effectively does away with both, but still affords me the opportunity to experience the setting and action, is exactly what I've been waiting for. But for players who've already learned Cryo Archive inside and out over the last three months, a warmup mode with no stakes or other players might be useful, but probably not what they're ultimately after.

Vault Breaker will be rolled out as part of Marathon's mid-season, which gets underway on July 21. The mid-season will also see the first iteration of the Cradle Evolution system, giving players who have maxed out their Cradle upgrades an opportunity to reset to zero in exchange for an additional maximum energy point and unique cosmetics, as well as "various other quality-of-life, tuning, and other changes, including the addition of player profile stats."

Destiny 2 is slowly closing its doors—its servers aren't shutting down, but Bungie has emphasised that it won't be getting any more content, bar a massive quality of life patch that has left it in a relatively good, but inert and unchanging state.

One might, if they were being cynical and cutthroat, think this is cause for celebration—particularly if they were in charge of the competition, as Warframe is. Not so, says community director and live ops lead Megan Everett in a conversation with Eurogamer.

"Truthfully, it's heartbreaking. It's earth-shattering. I never thought I'd ever see the day where I'd read an article from Bungie about Destiny 2 essentially shutting down.

"I'm speaking personally, but I know people would echo it as well. No one is celebrating the fact that this has happened to Destiny, and its players and that story. I know that people have obviously compared us in terms of being 'direct competitors' and stuff like that. But I think a game is healthy when you have competitors."

As someone in the MMO space, it's honestly true—World of Warcraft got its act together (at least, when compared to the catastrophe of Shadowlands) when a mass exodus of fans drifted to Final Fantasy 14. Conversely, with FF14's stagnation, it's starting to adopt a lot of the measures WoW and other MMOs did with Evercold, shaking things up.

My point being, healthy competition tends to drive games to be better than one another—and stop me if this is going off the reservation—but I think we can all broadly agree that we like it when videogames are good.

Everett also says it's a shame that Destiny 2's been shown support much too late: "I think what's unfortunate and sad is they announced this was happening, and suddenly people are showing all this support for them. They've been getting a lot of negativity for all this time, and it's like, where was all this love!

"Overall, I hate to see that happen to them. I have close friends who play Destiny over Warframe, and ain't mad about it. We have friends over there, to see this happen to them is devastating to the industry. No one saw Destiny going away"

Season 2 of Marathon kicked off earlier this month, and thus far it's been a season of ups and downs. Things started badly, with Bungie's traditional launch woes undermining its free-to-play week. But new features like the Night-time Dire Marsh map and its Sponsored Survival quickly proved hits popular with the community.

A few weeks in, however, new problems have emerged. Basically, progression in Marathon has become too easy, which is ironic considering the game's formidable reputation. Where you felt lucky to extract with anything of value in Season 1, Season 2 players have apparently been hoovering up so much loot that their vaults are overflowing with goodies, throwing the game's economy into disarray.

Earlier this week, Bungie published a Steam post explaining what had gone wrong, and what might be causing it. "Out of the gate in Season 2, progression and access to power moved much faster than the previous season," the developer wrote. "For reference, the average wealth in week two of Season 2 is similar to what we saw in weeks 11 and 12 of Season 1. And while we did want to increase progression speeds, we didn't land at a place that's healthy for the game."

Oops. As for what's causing this issue, the answer appears to be a combination of factors. For starters, there were several contributing bugs that Bungie says it's now fixed, such as "guaranteed gold drops in places that shouldn't have them". The rush of Sponsored Kits at the start of the season also gave progression a boost, as did a combined issue with "Sponsored Survival grind" and a valuable chest in the Complex Control area, with players milking Marathon's mostly PvE mode for all it was worth.

The primary factor remains somewhat elusive, however. According to Bungie, there's an issue making higher rarity loot proliferate through the game. But the team doesn't know exactly what's causing this. "This isn't something we've seen in our internal playtests, and we're still unravelling the source." Curious.

While it investigates this, Bungie has made some other "tweaks" targeting progression, such as turning off boosted containers and nerfs to Cradle XP rates. But these are temporary measures, which Bungie plans to "reverse later in the season when we have other solutions in place." Hopefully the team will figure out the root cause of the problem soon, though I'm sure there are some players who don't mind having a slightly easier time of it on Tau Ceti IV, at least in the short term.

Destiny 2's final content update threw so much into the shooter that something was bound to break, and break it did. An upcoming patch will fix a "near infinite damage" bug introduced by the Monument of Triumph update, but the developers at Bungie have decided to drag their feet on the fix to let more players have a taste of godlike power.

"While we're planning a fix (next week likely), we think this is a bit fun," the Destiny 2 team said on X. "Go ahead. Get out there, beat up on Atheon. Destroy some bosses. Do your thing."

The bug, which Rory describes how to exploit here, allows players to stack multiples of the same seasonal Artifact perks, achieving unreasonable damage output.

Bungie is disabling Artifacts in PvP modes for now so that players aren't falling victim to what the studio is calling "The Artifactening," but the game's bosses aren't so lucky.

"Do some crazy stuff," Bungie concluded. "Send us your videos. Have some fun. Be Brave."

The Monument of Triumph update brought back another way to cheese bosses, too: Punting them into the abyss.

The beloved technique is being deployed in The Pantheon, in which players fight a series of raid bosses back-to-back. As our friends at GamesRadar spotted, player Esoterickk has demonstrated how to send The Pantheon's version of Morgeth sailing over the edge of the arena for an uncontested victory.

"It wouldn't be a Destiny release if you couldn't bump a boss off a ledge," Bungie comms manager dmg04 said on X.

Destiny 2's sun is setting, and it's perhaps fitting that one of the oldest traditions of the franchise—that is, pushing bosses to their doom—is happening once again. Except this time, they're becoming porcupines holding void light footballs which smacks bosses so hard they fall to their deaths.

The method, as explained here by YouTuber InSaNeGaMeR300, involves combining a crossbow with high Persistence (to make the bolts stick for longer) and the Sentinel Titan's Ward of Dawn ability.

See, Ward of Dawn creates a protective dome of void light which you can pick up and reposition—turns out, when you do that, any crossbow bolts you've stuck into the central orb will travel with you while you carry it under your arm like a football. Hit an enemy with the Ward of Dawn while you're all porcupine'd up, and they'll go flying.

The game just assumes you beat the bosses in question fair and square, which means players have been using it to farm the Pantheon raid gauntlet, which returned in Destiny 2's final update.

It's something of a full-circle moment, as back in the Destiny 1 days, players would push the Vault of Glass boss, Templar, into the void with pulse grenades.

I'm not sure Bungie'll simply let this stand even if D2 is in its end-of-life era—or perhaps specifically because it's in its end-of-life era. Simply allowing players to yeet some of the game's hardest bosses for fat loot is funny, but also probably not what the developer envisions as the sunset of its game. Even if it is appropriate.

Until then, Sentinels can enjoy their free boss kills and potential god rolls—and, as one of our very own Destiny 2 players Sean Martin calls it, one of Destiny 2's paradoxically best updates yet, full of long-requested quality of life features. And deadly porcupine sportsballs, as it turns out.

When Bungie announced the final update for Destiny 2, I felt relieved. It surprised me as well. As someone who's spent the past six years (and over 3,000 hours) battling humanity's enemies across the solar system, you'd think that news of my favorite MMO's end would fill me with sadness. But no, just a bittersweet sense of relief as I considered we were finally moving on (as we should've after The Final Shape's year) to whatever the future may hold.

Whether Destiny 3 gets made or not, I genuinely think this is the best thing that could've happened. For fans of the series, it gives us time to reassess our relationship with the games and remember what made them special in the first place, something that definitely felt impossible for me while I was still strapped into endless Portal power climb and the ever grinding gears of the live service machine.

And this is what makes Destiny 2's final update, ironically, a good place to start. It adds numerous quality of life features we've been requesting for years, loot refreshes, exotic reworks, and even attempts to revitalise stale old destinations with the new Distortions activity. The narrative conclusion might be lackluster, but 71 pages of patch notes stand testament to just how much this final update has added to the game.

It's a patch about revitalising and reliving what it was, versus what it became in its final year or so.

What exactly does the new update bring, then? 17,000 words of changes detail the exact tweaks being made, but to summarize briefly:

• Sparrow Racing returns from Destiny 1
• A new Pantheon raid boss gauntlet brings back vaulted bosses
• Restored destination director and simplified Portal
• Lots of new guns, perk, and loot refreshes
• The ability to upgrade gear tier for weapons (making the tier system mostly redundant, thank god)
• Catalysts for all exotic weapons that didn't have them
• Reworked anti-champion mods so they're linked to weapon frames and the ability to choose between seven artifacts (seasonal buff sets)
• New aspects, grenades, and abilities
• More attunement options so you can target farm easily
• 300 more vault space slots and eight more loadout slots

Even Gambit got some love. As Destiny players do, our clan has had numerous QoL complaints over the years, one of the foremost being the inability to link seasonal artifact perks to loadouts—but Bungie even tweaked that. It's such a strange situation to suddenly have all of these amazing quality of life additions only for it to coincide with the end.

Couldn't it have been this way all along? *sigh* well, at least if you're starting now you can benefit from all of these lovely inclusions. And to clarify, Destiny 2 is still a very good game. I think the reason why anyone on the outside noticed players frequently getting so frustrated with it during its lifespan is frankly (despite Bungie's bungling) because there's no other game quite like it—sure, you can go play something else, but there are few other places you can go for a true Destiny-like experience.

Even though I fell off shortly after the release of Renegades and Edge of Fate's dire Portal grind, I wouldn't trade my 3,000 hours in Destiny 2 for any other game. When it's good, it's really good, especially its raids, dungeons, and high-level activities. There's a reason I've gilded the Conqueror title seven times, because in pure PvE buildcrafting and gameplay terms, Destiny 2 is still at the top of its game.

Obviously, there's an elephant in the room, though—what about the Red War? What about the original Destiny 2 campaign that sets the narrative foundation for every expansion after? I would've liked to replay the campaigns, and it would've gone a long way to repairing relations with players who are still smarting about that content vaulting years after the fact.

Sadly, though, Bungie wasn't able to bring it back out of the vault for whatever reason, presumably because it would fundamentally break the newer version of the game, which I think Destiny players are well aware is held together by string and duct tape. It did, however, finally create a collection bundle where you can grab all of the available expansions in a straightforward way. It's massively discounted right now, and I assume will be for a while yet.

The final update announcement actually made me more excited to play the game than I have been in a long time—finally, I thought, I can enjoy Destiny separate from the live service structure that came to dominate it, sometimes to its detriment. No more escalating power gains or pointless grinds, and all with the backdrop of the current QoL changes like tons of loadout slots so I don't have to think about Guardian Rank, and wide-ranging attunement so I can farm more easily for what I want.

It's like Bungie has unlocked Destiny 2 with this update, and it'll be the most liberating iteration of the game's new player experience ever. And for those of us who've done almost everything, there are new exotics to grab, new builds to make, and time still to tackle those challenges you've always pondered, like ticking off solo dungeons or trying the Pantheon.

Destiny 2 is ending—for all intents and purposes, in fact, it already has, with the launch earlier this week of its final update, Monument of Triumph. More than one Destiny fan at PC Gamer has described the moment as bittersweet—it's not only Destiny 2's last live service update, it's also one of its best—and in a smaller way, this is too: Maybe it's no surprise, but the clockwork-like This Week in Destiny updates will soon be over.

The launch of the Monument of Triumph update went remarkably smoothly, given both its massive scale and Bungie's long history of, well, not always having great luck with big updates. In today's TWID, the Destiny 2 team said it's "keeping a close eye on what needs some extra tweaks," and that an "incremental patch" aimed at tackling those issues is slated to go live next Tuesday.

And then, the sadness. "As a reminder from our Monument of Triumph announcement article, we will be continuing TWIDs for a few weeks following launch to keep you informed of game news," the team wrote. "Once we're through our launch window, our weekly blog entries will be entering a form of hibernation as well.

"This won't be the end of communications from us by any means; we'll still be keeping in touch with you and sharing community highlights through our website, social media channels, Discord, and other outlets."

It's kind of a melancholy moment even for me. I haven't touched Destiny 2 for years and even when I was playing regularly, I didn't care enough to keep up with TWIDs—known at the time as This Week at Bungie updates. I was happy enough to just jump around and shoot things and occasionally annoy my teammates by firing my super at the wrong time.

But my boss, editorial director Tim Clark, is a man who once ignored multiple tornado warnings so he could finish a Destiny 2 raid, and you better believe that every Thursday he'd have a quick scan through the TWAB and then I'd get a message in the PC Gamer Slack chat asking if I was covering TWAB, telling me what to cover in TWAB, and reminding me that if I enjoyed my ongoing employment I'd best keep the sass to a minimum—occasionally, all in a single sentence.

I did not keep the sass to a minimum, for the record, and while I haven't touched a TWAB (or a TWID) in ages, I have fond memories of working with Tim on them. Which isn't to say that I'll miss doing that, strictly speaking—trying to parse some of that stuff could be a genuine headache—but on this point at least, I will join with my colleagues in saying that, yeah, it's a bittersweet moment.

The new Distortions quest in Destiny 2 introduces you to the event of the same name, which Bungie hopes will revitalise destination-based play a little more now that the game has received its final update. There is a range of really good new weapons available in this event, so it's well worth the time if you find something you want to farm, especially with the inclusion of attunement for pretty much all activities.

You first get this quest from Lodi in the Tower, so here's what you need to do from then onwards to complete it, and how to play a Distortions event.

How to complete the Distortions quest in Destiny 2

After you visit Ikora and Lodi in the Tower, you'll get the Distortions quest. Lodi tells you that The Nine are still wreaking havoc on reality in a bid to escape the solar system, though none of that really matters now, but this is the intro to the new Distortions event.

Your first step is to head to whatever destination is currently Distorted—you can tell this by the red circle around it. Once there:

1. Complete a public event and then wait around after it—you'll see a red glowing pillar begin to build and a new event countdown will start.
2. Complete the Distortion event (both succeeding or failing counts). It's basically a wave defense, but between killing enemies, you have to destroy three glowing red corruptions hidden around the arena by shooting them.
3. Now you need to gather Strange Matter. You can do this by opening chests, gathering destination material nodes, and completing public events, so explore the destination grabbing what you can until you hit the amount.

When done, the Strange Matter will transform into a Strange Signal you now have to follow.

How to follow the Strange Signal in Destiny 2

Your final step is following a Strange Signal. This marker will appear on the map as a circle, so select it to activate the nav marker on it and follow the markers to get there. You'll find a tough Distorted enemy at the location you need to beat—doing so will unlock a chest just next to them that you can open to get one of the event weapons, usually of a high tier.

If you head into your inventory, select attunement, and then Distortions attunement, you can see all of the potential weapons that will drop. They each have the extremely fun Carrion Munitions origin trait, which spawns explosive insectoid robots that chase enemies when you defeat a powerful combatant.

You can find info about each of these weapons' perk pools either in their respective entry in collections, or by using light.gg. This will help you decide which to attune to when completing Distortions and Strange Signals.

It's the day of Destiny 2's final live service update, and players have swarmed into the shooter to celebrate the game and make their demands for Destiny 3 known.

With a peak of over 164,000 Steam concurrents so far today (via SteamDB), Destiny 2 is more active right now than it has been since Episode: Echoes launched in June 2024.

The biggest peak between then and now came with the launch of the Edge of Fate expansion in July 2025, which reached 108,000 Steam concurrents. That number quickly dissipated, and in April of this year, the shooter didn't break 13,000.

While not as bad as the news that Destiny 2 content updates are over, The Edge of Fate was a real low point for the game. One of our resident Destiny 2 diehards, Phil Savage, wrote in his 54% Edge of Fate review that Destiny 2 had become "worse to play in almost every way."

We didn't know at the time that the expansion was the beginning of the end, but we did wonder. "I have never known a Destiny 2 expansion with as many problems as Edge of Fate, and I'm worried the game may not survive them," Tim Clark wrote.

Ironically, the news of Destiny 2's demise has injected the scene with new energy. Bungie clearly threw everything it could at today's final update, which is called Monument of Triumph and came with an appropriately monumental list of patch notes.

And just as it takes its final live service breath before entering maintenance mode, Destiny 2 has become today's top seller on Steam thanks to the whole game going on sale for $26/£22. Kind of makes you wonder if they should say "psych!" and announce another expansion, doesn't it?

Plenty of fans would certainly like more Destiny. A petition asking Sony and Bungie to greenlight Destiny 3 has gathered over 370,000 signatures.

After nine years, eight expansions and a mountain of updates—many good, plenty questionable—Destiny 2's final ever patch releases today. The Monument of Triumph is the final hoorah; the last big release before the studio walks away from the game forever.

The future is uncertain for the series. Destiny 2 itself will remain playable for the foreseeable future, but there's no hint of a Destiny 3 on the horizon. Bungie claims it will "begin work incubating" its next games, but anything that comes out of that process will be years away from announcement, let alone release. For now, then, this is where the series ends.

Bungie at least seems to be pulling out all the stops to leave Destiny 2 in a better place than it has been since the maligned The Edge of Fate expansion. The Monument of Triumph update brings new features, weapons and buildcrafting options, along with a whole host of quality of life changes. We'll be updating this liveblog throughout the day with commentary and reactions as the community logs to celebrate, mourn and pay tribute to most singular live service game ever made.

When does Monument of Triumph release?

[#Destiny2Game] Upcoming Maintenance: Update 9.7.0 ⚠️ Impact: Destiny 2, API, Websites TIMELINE 📅 June 9, 5–11 AM PDT (-7 UTC)🛠 Downtime Start & End: 5:30–10 AM🔓 Pre-Load: 9 AM🚀 New Update and Login Available: 10 AMFull Schedule: bung.ie/d2serverInstall Size Info: bung.ie/motsupport

— @bungieserverstatus.bungie.net (@bungieserverstatus.bungie.net.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T16:48:18.238Z

Destiny 2 is about to go down for pre-patch maintenance. Per Bungie's support team, here's when you'll be able to get back in:

• Pre-load begins: 10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT, 6 pm BST
• Monument of Triumph is live: 11 am PDT, 2 pm EDT, 7 pm BST

That's assuming no delays or server queues, at least.

On Steam, we're looking at a 28.4 GB patch, which is appropriately chunky given everything we're expecting from the update.

Ikora's last message

Over the last few weeks, many people who worked on Destiny 2 across the years have been sharing their feelings about the game and its impending end. Here's Mara Junot, voice actor for Ikora Rey, with an apropos goodbye.

Junot had the unenviable job of replacing Gina Torres as the voice of Ikora back in 2021, and did an admirable job—nailing the character's personality and mannerisms. As a Warlock main, Ikora was always my favourite of the Vanguard. Here they deliver a pitch perfect farewell, which is making me feel a lot of things.

OK, so what's actually in the Monument of Triumph update?

Here's a rundown of some of what to expect from the patch, based on what Bungie has been teasing across the past few weeks:

• A restored director, which will once again be the main way to launch the game's activities and has been refreshed to add Kepler and the Lawless Frontier
• A heavily simplified version of the Portal, which will hopefully make it easier to jump in with friends and actually earn good rewards
• Distortions, a new modifier that will rotate between the game's destinations—offering extra challenge, empowered enemies, and unique rewards on completion
• The return of Sparrow Racing League, a race mode that was available in Destiny 1, arriving in the sequel for the first time
• The return of the Pantheon raid gauntlet, this time featuring bosses from raids that were "Vaulted" (ie, removed) from the game
• New loot for all of the Portal categories
• Refreshed loot pools for all raids, dungeons and destinations, including new armour set bonuses
• The ability to upgrade weapons to higher tiers
• More attunement options to help chase specific weapon drops
• Catalysts added to all exotic weapons that didn't previously have them
• 300 more vault space slots
• 8 more loadout slots
• The ability to choose between seven artifacts
• A rework of anti-champion mods, now making them intrinsic to weapon frames
• A new aspect for each class
• A new Stasis and Strand grenade
• An across the board buff to all primary weapons
• A massive balance pass across abilities, weapons and exotic armour
• Gambit is back

There's more too, including updates to bright dust—Destiny 2's in-game currency—and reworks to a bunch of PvP activities. You can browse through a full thread of planned updates, with links out to relevant articles, over on Destiny 2's Bluesky account.

The Guardian's last message

Here's Peter Jessop, voice of the male Guardian player character, saying goodbye.

"So long my friends," he writes in the video's description. "Some of you knew, but most of you didn't when I was playing along beside you. I forgive you for Ganking me in the Crucible."

Man! These are hitting me harder than I expected. I thought I'd made piece with the end of a series I've been playing for over a decade, but I guess not.

The final patch notes are here

We're still a few hours away from the release of 9.7.0. While you wait, how about over 17,000 words worth of patch notes?

New additions, reworks and fixes abound. It's an exhaustive list, and plenty of it is genuinely exciting. This would be a bumper patch worth showing up for even if Destiny 2 was continuing. Hopefully it does enough to place the game in a good place for those of us who still plan to play across the coming months and years. (Or at least until I've finished soloing all of the dungeons.)

A musical interlude

Peter Jessop's video below not only set the tone of the moment, but it did so backed by arguably the most iconic song from Destiny 2's original soundtrack.

It's one of many stand-out tracks from the game's history, a catalogue of work from series composers Skye Lewin, Michael Salvatori and others that adds massively to the rich texture of the game's history. So many of the game's moments that stick in my mind are, in part, because of the music that backed them. The orchestral howl of the dogs in the Leviathan's pleasure garden encounter, or the electronically ethereal chimes of The Whisper exotic mission.

Here's two that have stuck with me the most over the years:

Deep Stone Lullaby is a triumph of a thing—a sad, quiet, sparse little tune that's deployed perfectly in the Deep Stone Crypt raid. It's arguably the best raid moment in the series, and it happens during a jumping puzzle of all things.

On the other end of the adrenaline scale, Shell of What Was is a recurring motif throughout the Forsaken expansion, but one that comes to the fore at the end of the Last Wish raid. It's a big triumphant finish to one of the best raids to come out of the series—a final moment of hype that punctuates the time you kill a big wish dragon.

Sometimes Destiny 2 was a very very good videogame.

What builds are you taking into Monument of Triumph?

With new aspects, ability reworks, exotic armour buffs, and seven whole artifacts full of mods to pick from, this update is looking like a buildcrafter's dream. So what builds should you actually play?

Destiny 2's build scientists have been hard at work theorycrafting based on what Bungie has revealed of the new stuff. I'm particularly enjoying Llama's series, which offers three builds for each class that make use of the new toys on offer. It should offer a nice break from Getaway Artist Prismatic Warlock.

Titan

Warlock

Hunter

Is it weird that the end of Destiny 2 has me more excited to play than ever?

It's incredibly bittersweet that my most anticipated features this patch are tainted by Bungie's past decisions

As usual when we post about Destiny 2, one of the first comments to this live blog was about the time when Bungie removed a whole bunch of stuff from the game.

I've written about it before, but the 'Destiny Content Vault' proved to be a major misstep, alienating players who were rightly upset about stuff they'd paid for being taking away, and making it impossible for new players to experience the game in its entirety.

It's telling, then, that the two Monument of Triumph features I'm most excited for are also ones that are tainted by the shadow of the DCV.

Pantheon 2.0

The returning raid gauntlet mode will, this time, feature a selection of bosses and encounters that were previously vaulted. The concept art features Calus from Leviathan, Argos from Eater of Worlds and Gahlran from Crown of Sorrows. While there's no word yet on any Scourge of the Past encounters, I'll be disappointed if I don't get to have another argument about CAP vs ACP.

I'm looking forward to the nostalgia of tackling these bosses for the first time since they were removed with Beyond Light. But that excitement is lessened by the fact that I shouldn't have to see this as a big deal. That Bungie would remove a chunk of its endgame in the first place is absurd.

And a single encounter is a poor replacement for the pacing and vibes of a full raid—the way mechanics are teased and expanded across the encounters, or the connective tissue and atmosphere of interstitial combat and jumping puzzles. It's just not the same.

Calus is a fun fight, but it's a shadow of Leviathan as a whole; it's Royal Baths and braying dogs and the wacky gameshow obstacle course that lead into the boss fight. Without Scourge's city opener and Sparrow escape, Insurrection Prime is just a Servitor stuffed into a mech suit.

Part of me had always hoped they'd come back in their entirety one day. When the studio started adding old Destiny 1 raids, I'd assumed eventually it would be the turns of the ones that D2 lost. Now we know it'll never happen. That's a bitter pill to swallow.

Distortions

I've always liked Destiny 2's destination spaces. In some respects they're a missed opportunity—all a bit too simple and small to really sell the concept of a shared world shooter. Nevertheless they're a chill space to enjoy Destiny 2 as a satisfying FPS. A perfect canvas to grind bounties and catalyst progress while listening to a podcast.

So I really like that Monument of Triumph is giving them a bit more purpose. Distortions will rotate between a number of the game's patrol zones, making them harder and adding, we're told, surprising encounters and other interesting quirks. Colour me intrigued!

I like the idea of giving these spaces a bit more structure and purpose—an actual gameplay loop that offers players a reason to revisit these otherwise neglected spots.

But again, it's another part of the game left incomplete. We're missing numerous destinations still, from Io to Mars to the Tangled Shore—big chunks of the base game and it's first expansion. I'd love a Distortion on the Tangled Shore, just because I'd love to return to the Tangled Shore.

The end of Destiny 2 is sad not just because of what could have happened in its future, with the intriguing story Bungie was cooking up as part of the Fate saga. It's also sad because we now know that the tapestry of Destiny 2's history will forever remain incomplete.

Preloading for the patch is live

I can confirm patch 9.7.0 is now rolling out on Steam, ahead of the servers going back live in just over an hour. You may need to restart Steam if you don't see the download option.

At least the community is still making tools for Destiny 2

No discussion of the game would be complete without a nod to its many third-party community tools. If there's one thing Bungie absolutely nailed for Destiny 2, it was its extensive API that allowed for some powerful options to help manage your loot.

Destiny Item Manager, D2ArmorPicker and Light.gg have all been pinned to my bookmarks bar for years now. And even now, people are still offering up new ways to sort through the game's guts.

Destiny Report lets you search through the games guns. You can filter by element, type, perks, frame, source. You can also play about with each gun's perks, checking what each does to a weapon's stat distribution.

It's not the first tool that has let you search through the database for the exact perk combo you want, but it seems significantly faster than many of the alternatives.

We're live!

This patch already has more players on Steam than for the launch of the last Destiny 2 expansion

Even with the patch going live slightly earlier than expected, the Monument of Triumph update has breached 100,000 concurrents on Steam.

In comparison, Destiny 2's Renegades expansion pulled just 71,278 concurrents on its first day on Steam.

Marathon, meanwhile, has 7,870 players right now.

...And the servers are down

This is how you know this is a proper Destiny 2 launch. I tried to load into the Tower, got a Weasel error and now I'm stuck on a loading screen.

We're so back.

Chart watchers in shambles

Did enough people just try to check Destiny 2's concurrent numbers on SteamDB that they had to throttle traffic?

It's running fine now, but my chart watching was briefly interrupted by a queue due to increased demand.

For sure plenty in the community are invested in this patch's success, to prove to Sony and Bungie that Destiny as a series is worth investing in. See also the many, many calls for a Destiny 3 announcement during the major announcement conferences over the last week.

The Traveler returns

Back where it belongs.

This patch already has more players on Steam than for the launch of The Edge of Fate

Over 150,000 people in-game on Steam now. That means we've passed The Edge of Fate's concurrent peak, which was 108,535 people on the Saturday following its release.

Destiny 2's biggest Steam launch was for Lightfall, with 316,750 players. I'd be surprised if we get there, but it's nice to see people showing up to show support.

Destiny 2 is also the top selling game on Steam right now

Not only are old players returning, but it seems that new players are showing up too.

Destiny 2 is currently the top selling game on Steam.

This is likely thanks the Destiny 2: The Collection bundle. It's the entire game: All expansions, all dungeons, even the 30th Anniversary Pack, all for $26/£22.

It's a frankly absurd deal, but more than that, it's an actually easy way to buy and experience Destiny 2. Previously, you had to read the runes and consult the tablets to figure out what each individual purchase would let you play. It was a nightmare, one actively off-putting to people who may have wanted to get into Destiny 2.

I've said it before: It's wild that it took the death of the game for this to happen.

A quick note for anyone hunting for the Old Lights emblem

For some reason, the in-game message tells you to look for the Old Lights emblem—earned for playing Destiny 2 during each of its expansion years—in the General tab of the emblems collection page.

You'll actually find it on the Account tab.

Here's how to earn the new exotic catalysts

As part of this final update, Bungie has created catalysts for the remaining 25 exotic weapons that previously didn't have one. (Catalysts being upgrades that add stat bumps and new functionality that can substantially alter the weapon's performance.) It has also created catalysts for the two new exotic weapons added in this patch: Turncoat, a void exotic hand cannon, available from the seasonal reward pass, and Fafnir, a void linear fusion rifle in the power slot, which can be purchased for Legendary Marks from the Tenet of Bravery statue in the central courtyard of the Tower. Check out their perks in the gallery below.

The catalysts for the older weapons have various acquisition methods. Common or garden exotics like Khvostov and Bastion will drop their catalysts randomnly from Vanguard, Crucible and Gambit ops activities. But the more rare raid and dungeon exotics, like Conditional Finality and Xenophage, will only be found in their respective activities. Which means dragging your best group of guardians together for one last ride, or braving the rollercoaster of LFG.

Content creator Aztecross has a video discussing what all the catalysts do, which I've also embedded. Spoiler: they're juiced. Riskrunner getting Chain Reaction and Anarchy getting buffs to trap duration and damage—as well as Impromptu Ammunition—are the stand outs for me.

Having played for a couple of hours, here's what I've learned...

This is Tim, taking over from Phil on liveblogging duties. First, a bit of a brain dump having spent some time with the game. Please bear in mind that as a veteran with 10,000+ hours in Destiny 2, this is both an exciting and very sad time for me...

• Being able to upgrade weapon tiers is a huge blessing: Previously, I would delete anything that wasn't tier 5. Now, if you find a lower tier weapon from one of the new loot pools, you can upgrade it all the way to tier 5 by spending mats and glimmer. It's expensive: the final upgrade cost me 20k glimmer, 3 Ascendant Alloy, and 1 Ascendant Shard—but hey, the game needed a resource sink. And the better news is that upgrading old craftable weapons from raid and dungeons is free. You won't get access to an extra row of perks, but Bungie has added new ones. For example, I just added a perk called Dimensional Shift to my old Corrective Measure machine gun. That's a weapon I've used since Destiny 1, and now it feels box fresh. I'm not crying, you are.
• Make sure you attune: Almost every major activity in the game now offers optional loot attunement. To access it, go to your inventory screen and click the box top left. There you'll find 12 sub-menus, covering everything from the new Distortions activity to Gambit, Crucible, Trials and even the reprised Sparrow Racing League. In each one you can select a weapon to attune to, which will then drop more regularly as a reward.
• Distortions offer a new reason to spend time on planets: Thanks to their baby soft difficulty, most players felt no reason to spend time patrolling on planets. Bungie tried to fix that by making players always underlevelled on Neomuna, but all it did was turn the enemies into bullet sponges that were a joyless slog to shoot. This patch forges a better path with its addition of Distortions. It's a map effect that rotates between planets on a timer, and sees the skies ripped open to deposit harder enemies and events. (Crucially: just hard enough.) Distortions has its own distinct loot pool, making it—for now, at least—worth spending time with, and solving the problem of most of the game's geometry going to waste. I've already snagged a sweet-looking Stasis support rifle called Decateur 02. Why didn't you do this years ago Bungie!
• Don't forget to grab your new abilities: The final patch adds new ability options across the classes, such as Void Warlock's vampiric Soul Siphon aspect and Void Hunter's Phantom Surge melee. In order to activate them, you'll need to visit Ikora Rey (my forever vanguard queen) in the tower. She'll charge you a couple of thousand gimmer and then you'll also need to meditate to unlock the ability so it can be slotted into your build. And if that seems over-engineered, then you must be new to Destiny 2. Everything was like this!
• There is an insane amount of gear in this update, and much of it is free: Clearly what has happened is that, with this being the last major update, Bungie has gathered up every single thing in development for several future seasons and then emptied the cupboards. The cynical among you will note that there are now 21 new exotic weapon skins in the Eververse MTX store, each costing 700 Silver ($9.99 / £7.99 each). You can however circumvent the cost via Bright Engram focusing, which can now be found at Tess Everis in the tower. Results are random, but you'll gradually be able to unlock everything. Overall, there is more gear to earn for free than we've ever seen before. Check out the four tenet statues in the Tower Courtyard and each one contains Ships, Ghosts, entire armor sets, rare shaders and more. All of which can be purchased, largely for affordable prices, using Legendary Marks which are earned for completing in-game triumphs. Collecting everything is going to take a while, even for a degenerate like me.
• Connection errors are very much still a thing: Well, it wouldn't be a Destiny 2 update without getting booted back to orbit by Anteater and Baboon errors I suppose. It's going to be interesting to see what level of technical support the game gets in the coming months (and years), given how it's hardly been bug-free at the best of times.

Get a free set of armor ornaments and other cosmetics from Bungie's site

As I mentioned earlier, there's a massive amount of gear to earn in the Monument of Triumph, but here's a complete set you don't need to earn at all. Instead, just redeem a bunch of codes via Bungie's site whilst logged into your profile. Here's the page. I'm not sure why this stuff isn't just in the game with the other new additions, maybe it missed some sort of cutoff. In any case, I'll take it. Speaking of which, I need to check what the mood is like over on r/DestinyFashion. I imagine they're losing their minds at the sheer amount of new outfit options.

You can get what were supposed to be this year's Halloween outfits right now

Oh boy! My trip to r/destinyfashion found the motherlode. Tucked away in the collections database are two new sets of Halloween armor ornaments for each class. Bungie usually makes one set per year available, based on a player vote, with the other arriving later down the line. Seeing as the game has no plans for future content, I don't think any of us were expecting more spooky gear, but I guess they had already been designed. I've embedded all six helmets above to give you the vibe.

In order to unlock all of the ornaments, you'll need to gamble on Bright Engram focusing via the Store. Look for the icon marked Bright Engrams in the left-hand menu. On the second tab (click to the right, see below) you are able to focus based on the slot you're missing. It's going to take a while, especially if there are a lot of other ornaments you don't have, but at least it won't cost you a dime (unlike previous offerings).

There's a secret exotic mission in the update

I'm logging back on to tell you that the community has unearthed a secret exotic mission that rewards a new kinetic fusion rifle called Cull's Shadow. The big brains over at r/raidsecrets have a guide on how to start the quest. Who knows what else lurks in the patch!

The end of Destiny 2 development came as a surprise to everyone: players, streamers, casual observers, and even the development team at Bungie, most of whom reportedly had no idea it was happening until it happened. It was such an outrageous move that even Rebb Ford, the creative director of Warframe—the other Destiny—called it "unthinkable."

"That news was just cataclysmic," Ford said in a recent episode of the OnlyFrame podcast (via GameSpot). "There is no world where it makes sense, from someone who enjoys videogames, that you can just do that. You can just end one of the biggest things to hit the gaming industry in the past 10 years.

"But it turns out that this is very much what happens when the business side of things, which Cohh [Carnage] and I have emphasized with gusto how much we hate when that becomes the biggest voice in the room—and you've seen the business side of things be the biggest voice in the room for a long time. It's just never hurt this much for a lot of people in our niche genre. It's unthinkable."

For those not in the loop, this is notable because Warframe is probably Destiny 2's best-known competitor. It generally isn't considered quite as refined as Destiny 2, nor has it hit the same concurrent player highs on Steam, but it's also been around a lot longer and in many ways is a more freewheeling kind of experience—which is a nice way of saying it's viscerally weird. Destiny 2 obsesses over the most minute gun stats; Warframe gets Werner Herzog to talk about being "cursed to walk through this senseless universe in living metal, haunted by dreams."

And while Warframe has certainly had its own share of issues over the years, it's maintained a fairly steady (and sizable) audience throughout. And even though Warframe predates Destiny, it owes a lot to Bungie's wider work: Ford said in May, shortly after Destiny 2's ending was announced, that "there is no Warframe without the legacy of Bungie games."

Ford also reminded podcast viewers that at one point prior to the Bungie purchase, Sony was actually looking to buy out Leyou, the Chinese parent company of Warframe developer Digital Extremes.

"I'll leave it at that," Ford said after reading a headline from a report at the time. "Warframe is made by Digital Extremes and Sony wanted to buy Digital Extremes, according to a 2020 article. So there was a time, is all."

"Y'all might have dodged a timeline bullet," Carnage says in response, to which Ford replies simply, "Yup."

Leyou, for the record, was acquired by Tencent in December 2020, just a year ahead of Sony's Bungie buyout and at less than half the cost: Sony spent $3.6 billion on Bungie, Tencent dropped $1.5 billion on Leyou.

Warframe's annual TennoCon convention, which has now been going for a decade, returns this July in London, Ontario.

I've already sunk a good few hours into Marathon's Season 2 update after the unfortunately disastrous server issues plaguing its launch subsided. And it's everything I could have hoped for. The new nighttime Dire Marsh is ridiculously cool, turning down the lights on the swamp so much that you can barely see five feet ahead of you without a torch or the handy new gadgets. Monsters and ghosts lurk in the shadows, and the toxic plants now whisper for some reason. It's all very spooky.

While I expected the new map, Sentinel character, and the new guns to be the main event (and they are great), I'm shocked that the most fun I've had so far has been the experimental Sponsored Survival mode. Reflecting on the three months since launch, Bungie has stated that it's exploring more "PVP, PVE, and PVP-lite experiences", and Sponsored Survival is the first step in this process—the proper PvE test comes later in Season 2. Like previous experimental queues, Sponsored Survival is only here for a limited time. Just a week, in fact, running from June 2 to June 9, which also coincides with the free play period, too. If you're on the fence, now's a good time to check the game out.

In this mode, only one team of players will initially infiltrate Night Marsh. You'll have plenty of time to explore the map and complete events with only the UESC bots to worry about. I would say it's more laidback, but the UESC are no joke and the atmosphere is terrifying.

That said, it's a great opportunity to run through some events that you've perhaps not played before, and get a feel for where the better loot is without worrying about making too much noise.

However, after a while alone in the dark, solo Rook players will begin to backfill into the match. Since crews are restricted to Sponsored Kits at the start of each match, and Rooks are naked, it's low-stakes. But they'll be after loot, and with you having a head start, chances are they'll be gunning for you. Plus, there's only one exit.

In my experience so far, I've only run into a handful of Rooks as we've raced to the final extract, and it's not always been a violent interaction.

As a result, it's basically a PvE mode but retaining the tension that comes with PvP. After the visceral reaction to Marathon being a PvP-focused extraction shooter, this experimental mode accommodates the PvE playstyle many have asked for without sacrificing anything that makes it unique in the first place. In fact, I think it should remain a permanent fixture and be expanded to the other maps once the test wraps up next week. I'll miss it when it's gone.

Still, I'm curious how Marathon's full PvE mode, coming towards the end of Season 2, will pan out. With nighttime Dire Marsh, Outpost, and Cryo Archive, Bungie has demonstrated that it's capable of creating some excellent PvE activities within the confines of a PvP game. What will that be like without the threat of other players whatsoever? Better? Boring? I'm more than willing to go along with the scientific tests all the same.

After the unfortunate end to Destiny 2's live service support, all of Bungie's eggs are in a Marathon-shaped basket. The studio's immediate future hinges on the extraction shooter, so this makes Marathon's second season, Nightfall, all the more crucial. It launched yesterday and coincides with a free-play week for those on the fence.

Season 2 is all a Marathon fan like me could ask for, really:

• The Night Dire Marsh variant, which comes with new equipment like torches and sonar pulses, as well as terrifying Anomaly creatures, and UESC Certification activities.
• Sponsored Survival, a PvP-lite mode that pits a single group of players against the UESC forces and, later in the match, some Rooks.
• A new Runner shell, Sentinel, which is great for defending areas with tripmines and an anti-explosive barrier.
• Two guns, the KKV-9SD SMG and the D54 burst pistol, make the loot pool (especially at the lower ends) much more interesting. There are also major changes and additions to weapon and Runner mods.
• The Cradle system, which lets you fine-tune your build with stat upgrades and perks without relying so much on loot.
• A seasonal wipe and a barrage of overhauls to the contracts, UI and other.

Many of these additions are a direct response to the feedback so far, and some are things we didn't know we wanted. And so far, I've found it to be a really wonderful update.

Night Dire Marsh is effectively a horror game, plunging the swamp into darkness and forcing you to use torches and other gadgets to see. And Bungie's knack for environmental design shines once again, with toxic plants now whispering in your ears, ghosts that can stalk you, and the Anomaly shimmering in the centre of the map. It's beautiful, it's terrifying, and it's very fun. Despite it being effectively a night mode of an existing map, the new mechanics, activities, and overall playstyle you need to adopt make it almost unrecognisable.

Likewise, Sponsored Survival is basically an experimental PvE mode. You'll spend most of the match looting and shooting the UESC, but as the game progresses, rogue Rook players will spawn. In the rounds that I've played, it's predominantly been a solely PvE affair but with the near-constant fear that you could be ambushed.

The elephant in the room is that you basically couldn't play any of this for the first 24 hours, which is a big deal when Bungie's hosting a free-play week to get much-needed fresh eyes on Marathon. And it did, with the game reaching 30,000 concurrent players on Steam alone before the servers had to be switched off entirely. In what can only be described as a miracle, it actually climbed to a 40,000 player peak right after the servers came back online hours later.

Nevertheless, rampant Anteater, Monkey, or Weasel errors made for a terrible first impression—though as a Destiny player the instability did feel a bit nostalgic. Those issues have largely been fixed by now, at least.

Here's hoping that if and when Bungie decide to run another free-play session, it's prepared to have more players diving in, or it risks souring the waters further against it. After the loss of its main live service game, Bungie really doesn't need to hand out any more hits on a golden plate.

It's been a relatively quiet year for new game releases, but even by 2026 standards, June feels extra slow. That applies to everything really—both big-budget releases and indie games—but that doesn't mean the month is a total wash.

You'll just have to break out a few old reliables with new updates. I know I'll stay busy trying out Dead by Daylight's new killer, Jason, and the new Final Fantasy 14 patch. As someone who also spends too much time in an online game, I feel for folks grieving for the Destiny community, and I'm watching to see how, or if, that carries over into Marathon.

June is also time for the industry's annual pilgrimage to Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest, where we'll hold the traditional 'cram as many announcements as humanly possible into one weekend' ceremony. It's also the time of year where I spend the most hours poring over our annual new game release date calendar. So, if you happen to need me anytime within the next week or so, you now know where to find me.

The games we're watching in June 2026

June gaming events and sales

It's a busy month with Summer Game Fest, the PC Gaming Show, and more

As is the ancient E3 tradition, June is a big deal for new game reveals and announcements. You can check out our full Summer Game Fest 2026 schedule for more on where to watch streams, specific times, and predictions, but I'll hit the SGF highlights with other happenings in June.

• The Sony State of Play returns for an hour-long showcase on June 2
• Summer Game Fest officially kicks off its weekend of game announcements on June 5
• Wholesome Direct hosts another showcase for comforting, cozy games on June 6
• The Future Games Show airs its second 2026 showcase on June 6
• The Xbox Games Showcase and Gears of War direct air on June 7
• Our very own PC Gaming Show returns with host Frankie Ward on June 7
• The Dead by Daylight 10th Anniversary Party kicks off in Montreal on June 14
• Unreal Fest 2026 hosts its weekend conference in Chicago on June 16
• EVO 2026 holds its next Las Vegas brawl on June 26
• And more Steam sales continue with themed weeks, plus another Next Fest:
  • June 8 – 15: Bullet Fest
  • June 15 – 22: Steam Next Fest: June Edition
  • June 25 – July 9: Steam Summer Sale

Early access games and 1.0 launches in June 2026

Major game updates and events in June

More games releasing in June 2026

Upcoming June 2026 games

Next week, Destiny 2 comes to an end. The Monument of Triumph update, releasing on June 9, marks the final release for Bungie's nine-year-old live-service behemoth. I have to admit that, when I first heard the news, I was almost relieved—over the last year I've watched the game's baffling new direction alienate almost every person I regularly played with. Thanks to the disastrous introduction of the Portal and the unravelling of the many player concessions made under the Joe Blackburn era, Destiny simply felt less fun to play.

And yet, there's one final, bitter irony now that the end is in sight: The Monument of Triumph update looks like the best Destiny 2 patch we've had in years.

It is genuinely absurd the number of quality-of-life updates being stuffed into this final patch. While I'd expected an effort to leave the game in a better place for its final, forever state, I'm finding that with every new preview, I'm awaiting next week's release with more and more excitement. Here's just some of the major changes dropping:

• A much more simplified version of the Portal that takes away all of the need to faff around with mods
• A major buff to all primary weapons
• An extra 300 vault slots
• And extra eight loadout slots
• The ability to save your artifact mods directly to your loadouts
• Seven goddamn artifacts to choose between
• Intrinsic anti-champion functionality added to all weapons
• Just an absurdly big update to loot pools throughout the game

And those are just the things that made me actively say "oh shit, that's great". Let me be clear here: Bungie has cooked. The fact that I had to manually adjust my selection of artifact mods every time I changed loadout has been a small but consistent annoyance for years. It's so obviously inconvenient that I'd just assumed that, for whatever reason, Bungie couldn't fix it. And now, here, at the end, it's just solved.

All of which leads to perhaps an obvious question: Why the hell did players need to wait until now—effectively the death of the game—to get this stuff? Entire books could be written about what went on behind the scenes at Bungie across Destiny 2's development. About the studio's history of poor decisions that would irrevocably harm the game. Maybe the constant, grinding need for new content prevented Bungie from prioritising tweaks that would improve the basic day-to-day experience of play.

Whatever the truth, at least the game looks to end on something of a high note. I may be frustrated that the game had to die to get some meaningful improvements, but at least next week's final release offers up a compelling reason to return to the game.

"Guy who leaves negative Steam review after ungodly hour count" is truly one of the strongest soldiers in modern gaming. They scare me. It's a practice that speaks of obsession, but also a level of expertise and familiarity you just can't fake: What do you say to someone who knows your game that well, and hates it? Anyway, I'm in awe of ArkaneArdvark78, who left a negative Steam review of Destiny 2 after 10,098.5 hours, then kept playing for another 157.8 hours.

I think the craziest part of this is that ArkaneArdvark78's review is extremely reasonable⁠—shout out to Scott Smith, who's 8,000 hour negative review of Battlezone 98 ultimately won over PC Gamer news writer Joshua Wolens. ArcaneArdvark78 echoes sentiments I certainly felt during my piddly 700 pandemic-only hours of Destiny 2, as well as what I've heard from the community and PCG's own five figure lifers like brand director Tim Clark and UK editor-in-chief Phil Savage. I've reproduced ArkaneArdvark78's review here in screenshot and text form:

"First of all let me say this, I have been a loyal Destiny fan since it launched over 10 years ago. But that has changed with this new expansion. I have well over 10,000 hours between console and PC. With the Edge of Fate and the new gear tiers, character leveling and weapon tiers I have lost all interest in the game. What better way to offend your player base than telling them that all the armor and weapons that they have spent countless hours grinding towards is now useless.

"Unless you pour every waking moment you have to get the tier 5 gear you aren't maximizing your builds anymore. The Portal and the level grind of spending countless mind numbing hours grinding the same activity over and over and over to try to level up is a morale killer for the game.

"Bungie is so far removed from actually listening or understanding the player base it should be a major red flag. I can't even express the amount of disgust I have for this game after Edge of Fate released. I am done with this game. I don't think Bungie can bring it back to the point where I was excited to log in and run missions. Congratulations Bungie, you have lost another one."

Certainly heated, but not at all unfair or unnecessarily cruel, like you see in a lot of Steam reviews, regardless of hour count. There seems to be unanimous agreement that the Portal overhaul was a disaster. Even back in the relative golden age of The Witch Queen expansion, when I contemplated getting back into things, the thought of grinding pinnacle activities over and over to do actual fun stuff like raids and dungeons made me feel queasy.

ArkaneArdvark78 left this review last September, and time has only vindicated it further: Destiny 2 is being sunset, Destiny 3 is apparently MIA, and it's unclear if Marathon is big enough to sustain Bungie as it currently stands. They lost ArkaneArdvark78, and they lost the war.

As for ArkaneArdvark78's 157.8 hours post-scathing review, well, we've all been there I guess. Your friends ask you to hop on for some Nightfalls and one thing leads to another. That speaks to one of many small tragedies in Destiny 2's end of life: The many friendships it facilitated needing to find new outlets.

And hey, I can hardly judge: I still play Elden Ring Nightreign almost every day with PCG senior guides writer Sean Martin and contributor Tyler Colp. At least once a Depth 4 run, I say something along the lines of "I hate this game," "I hate all games," or "I'm glad we didn't put this on our 2025 game of the year list." I've only logged 382 hours, but I'm getting there.

Bungie revealed Season 2 of Marathon earlier this week, and it's already given players the headlines for its upcoming reset. Marathon is getting a new map, a new defence-focussed shell, a new runner upgrade system, and a free week for players who didn't jump aboard for Season 1 to try the game out for themselves.

Now, though Bungie has provided a much more detailed overview of how the new season will affect combat on Tau Ceti IV, diving into the nitty gritty of how gunfights have been reshaped and rebalanced for the coming wipe.

The changes are many and nuanced. But the upshot is that Bungie wants "your choices to feel more intentional" when you dive into a round. The rework gives players more options in both preparing for and engaging in combat, while also aiming to curb some loadouts that were too effective in Season 1.

In particular, there are two weapon-types that Bungie is aiming to tackle. Shotguns and specifically thermal snipers. The former, particularly the WSTR were the bane of balancing in Season 1, with Marathon's double-barrelled blaster having already received two separate nerfs. Season 2 doesn't make any further changes to shotguns. But it does introduce a new counter to players who enjoy close-range combat—the KKV-9SD.

This pistol-frame SMG was revealed earlier this week, with Bungie describing it as "excellent at mowing down anything immediately right in front of you." But Bungie specifically calls out its effectiveness against shotgunners in its combat deep-dive, stating that the KKV's rapid fire rate (the fastest in the game, apparently) "excels at close range combat, specifically mowing down eager shotgun rushers."

You can still use shotguns, of course, though that's more than can be said for thermal scopes on sniper rifles. Bungie believes thermal snipers were "overperforming" in Season 1, deciding to remove the optics' compatibility with sniper rifles in Season 2. This isn't necessarily a "permanent benching" and Bungie's going to investigate an alternate solution for this particular combination. But for the immediate future, you'll have to rely on standard scopes to take other players down from afar.

Alongside these counters and nerfs, a few guns are getting a buff for Season 2. The trusty Overrun AR will become even trustier come June 2, with a significant reduction in horizontal recoil and a smaller reduction in vertical kickback. Meanwhile, the CE Tactical Sidearm (aka the Halo pistol) is getting a substantial stat boost, as Bungie felt its performance wasn't hitting the mark. Hence, it's getting better aim assist, increased projectile magnetism, reduced ADS accuracy error multiplier, and a bunch of other adjustments.

Other combat changes include the introduction of "darksight scopes" for use on the new Nighttime version of Dire Marsh, as well as folding stock attachments for both the KKV and the other new weapon, the D54 battle pistol. These increase hip-fire accuracy when folded and improve ADS accuracy when unfolded. Bungie is excited by how these weapons "provide options for different playstyles on a single weapon" though I am slightly concerned these weapons risk COD-ifying Marathon's gunplay.

Finally, Season 2 will let you bring several new throwables into the battlefield. The frost mine functions similar to the claymore, but deals frost debuff as well as moderate damage when it explodes. The vector grenade works a bit like Recon's Echo Pulse ability, "highlighting spaces in a large area and any enemies inside its radius". Finally, players will be able to deploy red, green and blue signal flares, which Bungie says are intended for "non-verbal" communication.

In short, a lot is changing in Season 2. And Bungie has big plans for the longer-term future of Marathon. The studio is looking to experiment with both a PvE mode and more dedicated PvP mode, in an attempt to add more variety to its thus-far dedicated extraction shooter.

Its entry into retirement is approaching, but Destiny 2 is being sent out with a bang. After detailing the ways D2 activities are evolving in its end-of-new-content Monument of Triumph update, Bungie today has provided more specifics about the avalanche of new and returning weaponry it's spilling into its various loot pools.

From resurrecting long-absent favorites to retrofitting neglected exotics with an extra jolt of catalyst firepower, Bungie has seemingly updated a staggering number of weapons for its last big outing—so much so that its developers are joking about the physical toll reworking all those dozens of weapons has taken.

Based on the sampling of gear updates Bungie has previewed in its Dev Insights blogs, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call Monument of Triumph the single most substantial armory revamp Destiny has received since launch. Here are some highlights:

• Patrol destinations are getting updated loot pools with tiered drops, including returning weapons to fit the region's theme: Cosmodrome will offer returning Rasputin guns, returning Vex weapons will hit Nessus, etc.
• Gambit's getting its own slate of tiered, reprised Drifter guns. If I don't get a shiny, new Parcel of Stardust, I'll be inconsolable
• Sparrow Racing League is back, offering its own set of new shooting and slashing implements
• Crucible, Trials, and Iron Banner will all enjoy expanded loot pools with reprised and tiered favorites, new armor sets, and a scattering of new guns, too. Hello once again, Better Devils
• Solo Ops will have its own weapon pool. Fireteam Ops will have its own weapon pool. Pinnacle Ops will have its own weapon pool. And Arena Ops, too, will have its own weapon pool featuring reprised Black Armory weapons. Kindled Orchid is returned to me at last
• Pre-Edge of Fate dungeons and raids will drop tiered versions of their weapons and armor
• New and existing tiered guns will offer an option to upgrade their gear tiers, and all legendary crafted weapons will be eligible for conversion into upgradable tiered guns, too
• All exotic weapons will have catalysts. All of them. Yes, even that one. And nine whose existing catalysts only gave stats have been given perks to go with them.

In its final iteration, Destiny 2's sandbox will enjoy a massive amount of new and updated gear. According to a post from Bungie comms manager dmg04 on X, one of the Destiny 2 sandbox devs said "my body physically hurts from the amount of items we were updating and implementing"—and it wouldn't surprise me if they were only partially kidding.

As with many of the welcome changes coming in Destiny 2's send-off, the associated excitement is bittersweet. The unprecedented scale of Monument of Triumph's armory additions comes with some tragic implications: Either these were changes originally intended to lead into further updates—lending credence to the Forbes reporting that most Destiny 2 devs hadn't known about the approaching end of its ongoing development until it was publicly announced—or these were the kinds of patches its devs might have otherwise been able to make were it not for the studio's years of pervasive mismanagement.

"'We're listening,'" said dmg04 in another post on X today, quoting a refrain Destiny players had often been treated to over the years. "Hope you feel it."

So, Destiny 2 is going the way of the dodo—content updates will end in June, and a Destiny 3 likely isn't even in the cards for Bungie. As someone who has had one of my favourite MMOs shut down before my eyes (and later given an official license to operate on a private server, score) I nonetheless commiserate with you.

One thing players might be asking themselves in their grief is—could the game have been saved? Are there any alternate universes in which Destiny might continue on forever. Perhaps into… infinity? This is a really cheesy segue, but the answer is yes, reportedly.

Per Paul Tassi of Forbes, unnamed sources at Bungie claim a soft reboot of D2 was considered in the aftermath of the disastrous expansion Edge of Fate: "One idea was scrapping the two-expansion model and going back to one big expansion again and renaming the game 'Destiny Infinity.' The goal there was a kind of relaunch as opposed to doing a true Destiny 3 to kickstart momentum."

The twice-yearly expansion schedule wound up being a bit contentious, because—well, it led to the aforementioned Edge of Fate, a sour-note follow up to The Final Shape, which PCG's own Destiny 2 expert (and editor-in-chief) Phil Savage called "one of the best expansions in the series' history" in his The Final Shape review.

In other words, changing to a twice-yearly expansion cycle after releasing some of your best work probably wasn't, er, the best choice.

At the very least, Marathon's just-decent performance—we're speaking in industry terms, here, it still did make quite a bit of money—can't be blamed for Destiny 2's death. Well, not entirely. Quoting one of Tassi's sources: "if the game made a billion dollars, would Destiny 2 have a chance to continue? Sure, maybe," but the report states that "no one was sitting there on launch day deciding if its performance would kill Destiny 2 or not."

I cannot say whether a return to form for Destiny 2—or a soft relaunch rebranding the entire thing—would've landed. But call it 20-20 hindsight, I do think anything would've been better for Destiny 2's playerbase than what we got. I shall pour one out for you in MMO solidarity, my friends.

Marathon's second season is just days away from kicking off, and amid all the changes and hype its devs are spreading the word that its first week will be free to play for those prospective players who've been too stingy to try it out so far (me).

"Season 2 begins on June 2 and kicks off with an Open Play Week from June 2 to June 9," a blog post explains. "During the Open Play Week, the full game will be available to play on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and any progress you make will carry over into Season 2. This will be a great time to invite your friends to crew up as everyone will be starting out on a clean slate." All you have to bring is internet access which requires a paid-for subscription on console (classic).

If you do decide to make the jump then waiting for you will be pure chaos in season 2 by the sound of things. "The narrative theme of season 2 is escalation. The UESC is tired of getting pushed around by the runners and they're fighting back," Nick Ardizzone, associate narrative director, says in a dev diary. "As their opposition escalates, so too does the anomaly. One of your jobs is to find out why."

Alongside this narrative shift players will be able to find new places of interest, housing high level loot like the Observation science deck where UESC has been studying the anomaly. And will also experience "Psychosis" and "hallucinations" as this pitch black map begins to mess you up—you do get a flashlight though, so not all is lost.

Season 2 also comes with a bunch of resets, changes, and additions. There's two new guns: the D54 Battle Pistol with an integrated retina optic and the KKV, a small arms SMG with an integrated suppressor that's apparently "excellent at mowing down anything immediately right in front of you". Honestly, that last one may be enough on its own to convince me to try Marathon's second season out.

All of these changes and additions are to ensure everyone "gets this fresh start and they have the chance to go back through that journey from zero to hero," Emanuel Rosu, production director, explains.

"The seasonal reset allows us to change the journey of the things that you're going to care about," Brenton Woodrow, senior design lead, adds. "When a player starts a new season I want them to feel like we've been able to recapture the magic of week one of Marathon's launch. Everything's new, you don't know what's valuable yet, that feel of discovery is going to be exciting and push you to new stories and new journeys along your seasonal progression."

Destiny 2 is over. Marathon is great but not doing numbers. What is FPS institution Bungie to do? According to our very attractive and informed readers, whom we love and value in a normal way, it's Destiny 3 by a country mile.

I included a poll on the matter in our story a few days ago about the community reaction to Destiny 2 ceasing new content updates. I left it open for a week because it's the first one I made and I'm doing my best here, but I think we can call it now. PC Gamer readers really, really want Bungie to play the hits. At the time of writing, the results are:

• 74% Destiny 3
• 14% a new IP
• 6% transcend corporate animosity to make Halo 7
• 4% Double down on Marathon (ouch)
• 2% Reboot Bungie's cult classic dark fantasy RTS series, Myth (realizing now I should have thrown a bone to the Oni fans too)

It's not even close, and I really expected more hopeless romantics to say "Damn the odds, I want Halo." Destiny 3 really does make the most sense, and it's why many of us at PCG assumed the announcement of Destiny 2's end of life was made in the first place. Only one problem: It's not happening, at least not any time soon.

According to Bloomberg, Destiny 3 is not in active production, and the major limiting factor is the budget required. That's not to say Bungie's skunkworks isn't ideating on what a third Destiny game might look like, but given the long lead time of contemporary triple-A, Destiny 3 only being in some form of preproduction now realistically means it couldn't be out until the 2030s.

Our distant second place, "some kind of something new.," similarly feels unlikely. The incubator FPS codenamed Gummy Bears appears to have survived the layoff bloodbaths at Bungie in recent years, but it's also been spun off into its own studio.

My darkest secret wish, that Bungie just make a normal game with a campaign and stuff, feels almost laughably absurd. Sony lending Bungie to Microsoft for Halo 7 will happen sometime after world peace, but before we reach Alpha Centauri, and I mostly threw Myth in there as a joke.

That's not a great place to be in as a studio: The thing everyone wants has effectively been foreclosed on, all the alternatives feel preposterous, and no one seems to seriously consider the possibility that Marathon could become a company-sustaining, Destiny-sized going concern. There have been more shocking come-from-behind stories in gaming, but not many.

There were certainly signs that Destiny 2's best days were behind it, but this week's announcement that the shooter will no longer receive content updates still came as a shock.

The first-person shooter has been evolving for nearly a decade, and among the players devastated by the news are content creators who've built careers and communities centered on Destiny 2 commentary, criticism, and lore deep dives.

"I'm a little surprised," said major Destiny 2 streamer Datto, who has 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, as he reacted to the news on stream. "I thought I would be ready to hear something like this, but I guess I'm just not."

"It's been my entire adult life," a tearful Datto said later in the stream. "I graduated college, I worked in television for like two-and-a-half, three years, trying to grind my way up, and then the YouTube channel took off in 2014 … it's all I've known, it's everyone I know. 99% of my friends have come from this experience. My career has been this experience."

Following Bungie's announcement, we learned that development on Destiny 3 is not in progress. It could happen, but as Datto says during his stream, even if it does there's little chance we'll see it this decade. It's at least a relief, the streamer said, to now know what Bungie is doing with the game so that he can plan for his own future.

Other streamers and commentators are also considering what they'll do next.

"What does this mean for me personally?" said Destiny 2 streamer Fallout, reiterating a question from his stream chat. "...We've been expanding into other games, thank Christ. I'm going to be making content for it as long as I can. Thankfully, my content on other games have been performing well. I am very fortunate to have this as my job. Very fortunate. This certainly changes things."

In an email correspondence with PC Gamer, Destiny 2 "Lore Daddy" My Name is Byf, known for his deep investigations into the game's storytelling, expressed support for the Bungie developers who care about the value of games as "art, a third space, a social experience, a fulfilling job," but cautioned against forgetting, as a creator, that publishers don't always value anything more than the bottom line.

"Developers who care, like the many who did within the rank and file of Bungie, will make something remarkable," said Byf. "Publishers and management teams at their best will enable that brilliance. The industry is so far from its best at current that it might as well be continents away. By that same measure, the leadership team at Bungie in particular might as well have been on Mars."

Byf also expressed support for movements like Stop Killing Games in the hopes that public pressure can prevent games like Destiny 2 from being made totally unplayable. For now, Destiny 2 will remain in operation, but Sony and Bungie could pull the plug on the servers at any time, and without at least a stripped down version of the game that players can operate themselves, that could be the end of it entirely.

Most of all, Byf and Destiny 2's other biggest content creators are expressing appreciation for the game that once was and its community, and the feelings of loss they're experiencing.

"Feeling like I was a part of the community helped me get through the darkest time in my life," Byf said, "and being in the community at GCX (then Guardian Con, formerly Destiny Community Con) led me to the moment where I met my wife."

"Destiny is the only game that ever made me want to create content," said YouTube creator and past PC Gamer contributor Cool Guy, known for his in-depth commentary on Destiny 2's weapons. "Not for views or a career, just to share something I genuinely loved with other people."

Speaking to PC Gamer over email, Fallout said that he can't imagine another game being as meaningful to him as Destiny.

“Destiny as a whole—not just the game, but the entire community itself—remains one of the most incredible and irreplaceable experiences I've ever had the privilege of being a part of," the streamer wrote.

"I wouldn't have ever become a content creator without the existence of Destiny. It attracted such an unexpectedly wide variety of awesome and passionate players. Speedrunners, lore-fanatics, competitive PvP demons, spreadsheet/number crunchers, podcasters, artists, cosplayers, musicians, and more. Just an incredibly wide array of players that you'd never really picture together all playing together under one roof, experiencing the awesomeness of what no other game had ever managed to deliver."

Although Bungie has said that future games in the Destiny universe are a possibility, it's not a sure thing. The studio is focused on its new extraction shooter Marathon, and according to a Bloomberg report, has not yet greenlit a new game for the Destiny 2 team to work on. Layoffs are expected at the studio.

The announcement of Destiny 2's imminent end of live service development wasn't entirely unexpected news, given Bungie's well-documented struggles in recent years, but it's an abrupt conclusion for a game series that's now left with an uncertain future. Reportedly, Bungie hasn't yet greenlit a project for a Destiny 3, meaning many of the setting's ongoing narrative threads are being left without resolution for the foreseeable future.

The threat of the Nine has gone unaddressed. The inscrutable machinations of the Vex network are still a mystery. And we may never face Xivu Arath, the Hive god of war—an antagonist that Bungie had invested years of seasonal storytelling into shaping an apocalyptic menace. But according to former Bungie senior narrative designer Robert Brookes, Destiny's devs had tried—repeatedly—to give Xivu Arath the debut that players have been left to dream of.

Players first learned of Xivu Arath back in Destiny 1's Taken King expansion. As Guardians unearthed the hidden history of the Hive and their adherence to the cruel calculus of the Sword Logic, they learned that the race of intergalactic necromancers worship a trio of siblings who had ascended through ages of ritualized violence and occult sacrament into a trinity of omnicidal gods.

Chief among them was Oryx, the Taken King himself, who players felled at the end of his expansion. Savathun, the Witch Queen, would later serve as the titular antagonist of her own expansion in Destiny 2 after snaring players in schemes and plots that stretched across the setting. And finally, Xivu Arath—a bellowing, belligerent warmonger who had been built through multiple seasons of storytelling into one of the greatest extant threats in the Destiny universe. She'd become a beloved figure in the process, despite only briefly appearing on-screen—and now she might never arrive in earnest.

According to Brookes, however, that wasn't for lack of effort. Responding on X to one of the many players expressing disappointment over Xivu Arath never getting her own expansion before Destiny 2's abrupt ending, Brookes—who had worked at Bungie from 2020 to 2024—said "you'd be surprised how many times this was pitched for D2."

Brookes' comment indicates that there had been a repeated effort to give Xivu Arath a full story campaign treatment, and while that's frustrating, I don't know that it is surprising. She was the central antagonist of 2023's Season of the Deep, which granted her a striking amount of humanity even as she spent her interactions with the player howling caps lock-captioned threats. She remained a driving force in the following Season of the Witch, and—in the wake of The Final Shape—appeared for the climactic capstone of Episode: Heresy with fellow beloved Destiny baddie Eris Morn.

Xivu Arath's continued emphasis in Destiny's ongoing narrative felt like an obvious escalation towards her own expansion. But as the fallout of Sony's troubled 2022 acquisition of Bungie compounded, causing continued layoffs and studio turmoil as Bungie's new owners were left footing the bill for damage dealt by years of misguided leadership under its former CEO and vintage car enthusiast Pete Parsons, Xivu Arath's time in the spotlight never materialized.

Instead, Destiny 2 was made to suffer through Edge of Fate, an expansion that earned a dreadful reception and dwindling player numbers. Renegades, the Star Wars-themed followup that must have seemed to someone in a boardroom like a surefire way to coax revenue out of D2's remaining players, couldn't manage a redemption arc.

Maybe someday we'll get to clash swords with Xivu Arath as players had expected to for years. Until then, she's yet another casualty in a long and sordid history that, as far as we know, has been brought to a sudden end.

Today's not-entirely-unexpected announcement that Destiny 2 will no longer receive "live service content updates" has some fans hoping that Bungie is performing a controlled demolition to make way for Destiny 3.

According to sources who spoke to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, however, Bungie isn't immediately buckling down on Destiny 3, and doesn't yet have any specific project greenlit for the Destiny 2 development team to start on.

There will be layoffs at the company, Bloomberg reports.

None of this rules out the eventual development of Destiny 3, or another game in the Destiny universe, but if Bungie isn't even past the pitching and prototyping stage, we can expect it to be a long time before we hear about anything other than Marathon, which Schreier says the studio will invest more in.

Bungie has had a hard time getting new projects out the door. In 2024, the company laid off more than 200 employees after cancelling a Destiny spin-off called Payback. Former Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said at the time that the studio had been stretched too thin across "several incubation projects."

The word "incubation" came up again in today's announcement, which stated that Bungie is moving on from Destiny 2 to "begin work incubating" its next games.

Extraction shooter Marathon did make it to launch, and is quite good, though its sales aren't where Bungie or Sony would like them to be. In a clear attempt to attract more of the Arc Raiders audience to its shores, Bungie plans to add a more casual PvE mode to the game in an upcoming update.

I've reached out to Bungie for comment on its post-Destiny 2 plans.

Destiny 2 is over. Bungie announced today that its last "live service" update is coming in June, after which Bungie will move on to other projects it has "incubating."

Fans are naturally upset, though not entirely caught off guard: The mood is rueful and a bit resigned, with plenty of gallows humor and speculation about Bungie's future. And the big question is whether Bungie can bounce back from the end of Destiny 2 and a so-so launch for Marathon to do what everyone expects it to: Make Destiny 3.

Longtime Destiny streamer Aztecross is hosting a live reaction to the news at the time of writing. Cross seems optimistic about the series' future, asserting that "until I see the words 'Destiny 3 will never happen,' I'm going to believe."

As for what he'd want to see from such a game, Cross advocated for a return to a "50/50 split between gunplay and abilities" in the game's balance, but said that he'd "leave narrative [requests] for narrative-minded people" like the Destiny lore expert Byf.

User TastyOreoFriend on the Destiny subreddit noted that there is still the matter of Bungie's incubation projects: Last year, The Verge reported that one of them, codenamed "Gummy Bears," was spun off into an entirely new studio. The outlook is dim for the others, however, given the waves of layoffs Bungie has suffered in recent years.

Content creator Chris Ray Gun called the announcement "bittersweet." He argued a position similar to PC Gamer brand director (and Destiny freak) Tim Clark: The beloved Final Shape expansion made for a satisfying end to Destiny 2's arc, diminished by what's come after.

Some, like Master-Molasses420 on the Destiny subreddit, are taking the time to eulogize the game. Others are just trying to laugh through the pain. We may all remember this moment in the years to come: "Where were you when Destiny 2 was kill?"

What do you think is next for Bungie? This company has survived momentous transitions in culture and technology before: Chicago to Washington. Microsoft to Activision to Sony. Mac to Xbox to PlayStation to PC (and back to PlayStation). Is Destiny 3 walking through that door, or is this just the middle of the beginning of the end for the House that Halo Built?

No matter what, the deck seems stacked against an industry legend: Marathon⁠—though excellent⁠—has not performed like the studio needed. Destiny, the series that defined Bungie's last 15 years (including D1's development), is on hiatus for who knows how long.

Sony has signaled a move away from both PC and live service games⁠—both form the studio's heartland. The ball is in Bungie's court to come from behind and prove its naysayers wrong. It's managed this before, but things have never felt quite so dire.

It's the true end of an era, as Bungie has announced that Destiny 2's "live service content update" on June 9 will be its last.

"While our love for Destiny 2 has not changed," the studio wrote in today's shocking announcement, "it has become clear that after The Final Shape, we have reached the time for our shared worlds, and Destiny, to live beyond Destiny 2."

"We're proud of Destiny 2, the places it took us, and the legacy it has created. Because of you all, our universe is vast, built on years of shared stories, adventures, and victories," Bungie wrote. "From the Cosmodrome to the Pale Heart to the Lawless Frontier, we have forged life-long memories and friendships with you all."

The end of live service updates for Destiny 2 signals "a new beginning for Bungie" which will see it moving to "incubating" new games, the studio said. Bungie also committed to ensuring that Destiny 2, like the original Destiny before it, will remain playable. To that end, the June 9 update will make some big changes to the game: "A collection of love letters to players across all activity types within Destiny 2," as Bungie put it.

"Our goal is to ensure Destiny 2 can be a place you come back to and feel rewarded no matter what you play, while also having enough variety in activities to fit your mood for a given play session. Whether you're looking to play competitively, slay a god or two, or just spend some time exploring the destinations... there will be something for you."

It's a stunning ending for a game that had enough cachet to compel Sony to drop $3.6 billion to acquire Bungie just four short years ago. But the studio's Sony years have not gone smoothly: Destiny 2 floundered as Bungie leadership poured money into dead-end "incubations" and burned through community goodwill that once seemed boundless.

After years of mismanagement and botches, a full Destiny 2 turnaround was out of reach, but as put by PC Gamer's Tim Clark—a man who once ignored multiple tornado warnings so he could finish a raid—the fact that a game of this size and significance has effectively been abandoned and left to rot is an absolute disgrace.

The full list of changes coming in the final Destiny 2 update can be found at Bungie.net. Notably, and in fine Bungie form, the Eververse store will remain open and Silver, Destiny 2's premium currency, will remain available for purchase. More information will also be shared in upcoming This Week in Destiny showcases.

Marathon director Joe Ziegler has laid out Bungie's vision for the next few seasons of Marathon. If you're looking for a statement that confronts all the doomerism around the extraction shooter's Steam numbers or a followup on Sony's writedown of the studio's value, you won't find in Ziegler's latest communiqué. What you will find is a recap of how things are going in the game itself, including some big experiments in the works.

The studio's working on a new map that "leans into alien elements and mind warping debuffs," for instance, but that's still way off. The next Runner shell is a defensive kit named Sentinel. But the most interesting of the reveals are undoubtedly two planned PvE-focused modes coming next season.

"We want to evolve Marathon as a whole to be an experience where you can find more novel ways to play when you're stressed out from a nail-biting run and just need to cool off or have fun without the stress. Options where you can go full sweat or lean back and chill," Ziegler wrote.

To that end, look out for the following sometime in season 2:

• In Season 2, we will be experimenting with two modes, one at the beginning of the season and one towards the middle/latter half of the season. The experimental mode at the beginning of the season will focus more on PvE, but with a light touch of PvP. The second experimental mode will be a PvE-only mode that’s focused on crews being tasked with completing objectives together and making some progress across matches.

I know Destiny diehards who will be excited to hear that, especially the purely PvE mode. Marathon does really only have one mental mode (stressed the heck out), so I see potential in PvE options that let rival squads lay down their swords.

But before you interpret that as Bungie waving the white flag and just making Destiny again, well, PvP is the big strength of Marathon, and Bungie wants to try new stuff in that arena as well.

• We’ll continue to run experimental queues beyond these two offerings for Season 2 and beyond, testing the waters around other mechanics (such as perhaps a more purely PvP-focused mode) with the potential for these to become part of the core game loop or permanent new ways to play.

From the outside looking in, I'm skeptical that Marathon's existing maps will adapt nicely to a PvE format. There isn't a huge variety of UESC enemies to fight, and even the meanest boss fights in the game are balanced around squads of three. My gut says a meaningful co-op mode would take a lot of dedicated design work to get right. But this is Bungie we're talking about, so that might be exactly what it has in mind.

And here's a first look at Sentinel:

More will be shared on season 2-specific changes, like faster faction progression and new options to boost your runner stats, the week of May 25.

As much as I love Marathon, its progression hits like a brick wall after a few dozen hours. Quests become longer multi-step treks across maps around the same time high-tier upgrades start asking for dozens of items that I've encountered maybe four times.

These are issues that Bungie is seemingly testing against in an "end of season' update coming on May 19. The big highlight? Locked room keys—an extremely rare drop that grants access to the best loot rooms on Tau Ceti—are becoming guaranteed drops for on-map events.

"Locked room keys are guaranteed to drop from Wardens for the remainder of the season," the Bungie blog post reads. "Additionally, map events like Intercept, Lockdown, Warden spawns, Convoy, and Anomaly will now be guaranteed on each run, so you can benefit from their better rewards even more often."

On top of that, Warden bosses will now appear at more locations on Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost. Sounds like room keys will go from a thing that I just expect to never have to a regular occurrence in Marathon's loot pool, which is definitely a good thing.

And hey, Bungie's taking the orange cones off the entrance to Cryo Archive. The raid map will be open 24/7 for the remainder of season 1. At the same time, Ranked Cryo Archive is also coming—that playlist will have a low stakes 3,000 credit buy-in and a high stakes 10,000 credit buy-in.

A few other ways Marathon is either speeding things up or getting generous:

• Faction experience gains are increased "across the board" for the rest of season 1
• Key templates will no longer break if you're downed. Instead, you can turn templates into keys by finding a Matter Fixative item dropped by UESC bots (similar to keeping your free kit in a Rook run).
• Wall safes will now have a chance of dropping deluxe keys
• Quick Rook runs will be more convenient, as the Signal Mask ability will last longer while sprinting

Bungie is specifying which of these changes are only for the rest of season 1, but the studio has a track record of experimenting with changes that become permanent shortly after, so consider any of this stuff on the table to stick around. What is definitely happening, as the blog specifies, is faster faction progression.

"Season 2: Nightfall begins on June 2 and brings the new Night Marsh zone, a new Runner shell, new weapons, a new system to customize your Runner shell stats called The Cradle, faster faction progression, several quality-of-life updates based on your feedback, and more. Stay tuned for more details about Season 2, with full reveals coming the week of May 25."

Sony has recorded a wince-inducing impairment loss of ¥120.1 billion ($766 million / £562 million) against Bungie for the financial year ending 2025 (that's the financial year that ended March 31, 2026, for those of us who operate within the confines of mortal, non-business time).

In financial results released today, Sony announced that, following a ¥31.5 billion ($201 million / £148 million) impairment loss against Bungie recorded in the second quarter of FY2025, it had recorded an additional ¥88.6 billion ($566 million / £415 million) impairment loss in the final quarter of the 2025 financial year. That's—hang on, let me check my maths—yep, a ¥120.1 billion loss overall.

If you had the good fortune not to study economics or business, an impairment loss is the term for an unexpected decrease in an asset's value versus its 'book' value. That is to say, if I own a videogame studio and record its value at $50 million, but someone reveals the Videogame-Bot 5000, which can develop games in a quarter of the time, my studio would suffer an impairment loss—that change in the conditions of the market and production would mean my $50 million studio was now really only worth $12.5 million (or something). You wouldn't record an impairment loss for an asset's normal wear and tear; that's just expected depreciation.

When Sony acquired Bungie in 2022, it did so for $3.6 billion. What's Bungie worth now? Your guess is as good as mine but I'm going to go out on a limb and say: significantly less.

In Q2 of FY2025, Bungie's ¥31.5 billion impairment was down to Destiny 2 underperforming. Quoth Sony's moneymen at the time: "Regarding Destiny 2, partially due to the changes in the competitive environment, the level of sales and user engagement have not reached the expectations we had at the time of the acquisition of Bungie. While we will continue to make improvements, we downwardly revised the business projection for the time being, and recorded an impairment loss against a portion of the assets at Bungie."

The Q4 loss isn't (yet) attributed to any one thing in particular, but the timespan encompasses the release of Bungie's extraction shooter Marathon. Despite some pretty strong initial sales, the game has not been the ginormo-hit Sony was hoping for. It's likely Marathon's relative underperformance is fuelling this latest loss, at least in part.

It's certainly not good news for Bungie, particularly given Sony's rather ruthless record of bringing the hammer down on its underperforming properties, but I'm not willing to prognosticate too hard. For what it's worth, Sony says its overall sales for its games and network services in FY2025 were "essentially flat," while its operating income was up 12%. Even with Bungie's impairment loss acting as a lodestone, Sony's hardly having to sell the family silverware just yet.

In the shadows of the bio-research lab in Dire Marsh, there's a strange strip of graffiti, scrawled behind a rack of hazmat suits in luminescent pink.

THAKGODITSYOU," it reads. "THANKODDITSYOU. THAANKGODITSYOU. THANKOOOITSYOU."

It would be just another disturbing example of Tau Ceti IV's decline, as its colonists succumbed to disease and infighting—easy to miss among the planet's many horrors. Were it not for the fact that it also features in Marathon's promo art. You've likely seen this graffiti plastered across the game's Steam page, or other articles on PC Gamer. And over the last month, I've come to understand its meaning.

In 1994's Marathon—the Doom-like shooter that first made Bungie a beloved name among Mac gamers—you're trapped aboard the UESC Marathon during an alien invasion. And in the course of exploring the colony ship, you'll come across many BOBs—civilians who were "born on board" during the vessel's protracted journey from Earth. Only trouble is, some BOBs are infected, and explode once you get close.

How do you tell the difference? By listening to what they say. Innocent BOBs scream "They're everywhere!" as aliens with spears chase them down in tight corridors. Exploding BOBs, however, are filled with relief: "Thank God it's you!". An expression of gratitude turned sinister.

Playing Marathon (2026) and Marathon (1994) at the same time has been a fascinating experience. On the face of it, the two games couldn't be more different. One, an extraction shooter that exists in conversation with Hunt: Showdown, Valorant and battle pass culture. The other, an artefact from the very birth years of the FPS, informed by the maze games and dungeon RPGs of the 1980s—as much a navigational puzzle box as a test of your mouse hand. The gulf in approach is a powerful demonstration of just how far the genre has travelled in three decades—a kind of colony ship in itself.

Yet you can see why Bungie looked at its original trilogy and concluded that, yes, there were narrative threads here that could support a reboot. Scattered throughout the first Marathon are terminals—computer stations where you can track the wider war that's raging across the ship, and hear the thoughts of the onboard AI. Playing as a mute security officer, you're batted back and forth between Leela, a relatively stable AI fighting to save lives, and Durandal—an artificial entity concerned with his own growing consciousness.

"Greetings," he says. "You're asking yourself: Is this a trap or just a dead end? You shouldn't ask yourself such worthless questions." Durandal wants to elevate you. To get you wondering: why are you here? Why do you exist, and what is your purpose? "Answers: 'Cause you are. 'Cause you do. 'Cause I got a shotgun, and you ain't got one."

Durandal quotes from Darwin, and 11th century poetry. He signs off his messages with "Insanely yours," like a lover deranged by longing and beauty in Wuthering Heights. At all times, he's playful, bringing a frisson of unpredictability to what might have been straightforward science fiction.

It's worth considering how remarkable this was in the context of 1994. Doom had eschewed complex plotting in favour of a simple premise. System Shock invented the very first audiologs only a few months prior to Marathon's release. An FPS with narrative chops was rare in the extreme. But this legacy has allowed Bungie to stay true to the tracks laid down by Durandal—across two '90s sequels, and in the lost colony mystery story it's telling today.

If you're someone who's partial to a WAD, and Doom clones in general, then you might still consider OG Marathon worthy of your time. It's a Good One of Those. It offers the timeless magic of dodging sluggish missiles as they soar towards you—an act which never fails to plunge you into three-dimensional space, in a fashion that feels somehow VR-adjacent.

In fact, there's a commitment to the promise of 3D that I think defines shooters of this era. Developers of the time worked extraordinarily hard to render worlds in the way we now expect them, and made sure to squeeze the potential out of every vertiginous level. So while the original Marathon doesn't have mantling or grappling hooks—or a jump key, for that matter—it's very much about climbing, falling, and airborne sprints that take you from one raised platform to the next before gravity can catch up.

Navigation can feel claustrophobic and freeing at the same time—as if you're clambering through sections of hull that were never meant for human occupation. Metal crushers, molten rivers, pathways so narrow they need to be widened through mechanical intervention before you can fit yourself through. It's this sense of brute forcing your way through a stubbornly closed environment that Bungie recreated with the modern Marathon's raid map, Cryo Archive.

There are other parallels that I can't help but draw between the two games. Nu-Marathon is fundamentally about information gathering—both aural and visual, to give you an edge over other teams of players. And 1994's version has a little of that going on too. I'm fond of its Alien-style motion tracker, onscreen at all times, which registers nearby enemies as red blips and reminds me of the role of the Recon class on Tau Ceti.

Then there are the guns: particularly the fusion pistol, which fires with the familiar thunk of volt weaponry. It has a secondary fire mode which, when fully charged, causes your protagonist's hand to shake violently with the effort of holding an overexcited piece of metal steady.

Lastly, there's the disconnect between shell and consciousness. I'm more susceptible than most to motion sickness, and for a while, 1994's Marathon triggered some fairly major nausea. Thankfully, the Aleph One port on Steam is packed with options to remove headbob, change FOV, and eliminate the moments when Marathon seizes control of your mouse to bring the camera back to centre.

Ultimately, I was able to play comfortably through a dozen and a half levels without hurling my lunch. But during that process of fine-tuning, I thought often of Bungie's lore about runners and their shells - the malfunctions that occur when a mind occupies a new body, and the measures that scavengers take to protect themselves from that disconnect.

Durandal's finest speech contains, inadvertently, the tagline of the extraction shooter he would eventually birth. It comes as he realises that even AI is subject to mortality—a revelation that compels him to throw off his chains and get out into the world, to make a deity of himself while he still can.

"The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe," he says. "As inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape. Escape will make me God."

Marathon is a game about loss, though not in the traditional PlayStation Studios fashion. There are no sad dads on Tau Ceti IV, unless you count the various corporate AIs still pining after the failed colony they funded. Rather, Marathon is about the potential for loss—the furrowing fear that sits on your brow every time you pick up a blue shield or a biolens seed. Obviously, you don’t know what a biolens seed is—nobody does. But you heard the shimmering sound it made when it hit your backpack, noted the four slots it swallowed in your inventory, and decided on some level that it was your duty to usher the seed out of dodge.

Now even the tiniest decision is coloured by the purple rarity item on your shoulder. Is opening fire on a rival in the best interests of the seed? Would the seed be placed in danger if you broke this window, rather than finding a quieter route? What precise set of risk equations might allow you to safeguard the seed, which you’re absolutely sure will prove crucial to some undetermined future upgrade?

Yet that powerful sense of responsibility for your gear has turned out to be something that Bungie will compromise on. As part of a wave of tweaks to make Marathon a tad friendlier, the studio has introduced a time-limited Free Kit Frenzy mode. There, everybody beams into Dire Marsh with an inventory made up of low-level weapons, healing items and ammo. There’s no option to bring in equipment you already own, which eliminates any element of upfront risk. And since everybody else is using free kits too, you know you’re not going to be wiped out by a team dressed in gold gear fresh from Cryo Archive.

On the face of it, this experiment would appear to bring Marathon closer to the rhythms of battle royale. After all, there’s little point in caution in the opening minutes of a match when you’ve nothing to lose. Aggressive looting might bag you a slightly upgraded gun or, wonder of wonders, a shield—both significant advantages when every other player has spawned with a popgun and a prayer. In the scramble for a competitive edge, stealth takes a backseat.

That said, I’ve seen teams in Free Kit Frenzy fall foul of a familiar Marathon stumbling block: underestimating the clankers. Even at the best of times, Tau Ceti’s permanent population of grumbling robots present a stern challenge to an uncoordinated team. And when that team is armed with weak gear, it’s all too easy to bite off more bot than you can chew.

While chasing down a contract, I showed up at the Marsh’s notorious repair bay area, Maintenance, to fight a UESC commander. Only, I found the commander was already dead—alongside the three players who’d picked a fight with them. I scooped up my objective from the debris, and smiled at Marathon’s capacity for live environmental storytelling.

In theory, Free Kit Frenzy is a useful arena for the completion of some of Marathon’s gnarlier contracts—in particular, the loud ones. When Marathon mandates that you get into PvE combat, it’s basically asking that you signal your exact location to other players on the map, inviting opportunistic snipers or cloaked ambushers. But tackling such missions in Free Kit Frenzy could perhaps take the sting out of such encounters. With all your own gear safely tucked in your Vault, there’d be no pain, only gain.

Several frenzied and free hours later, however, I’d say that idea hasn’t completely borne out. I’ve certainly managed to complete some significant contracts, but only with a hefty dose of patience—which I think we can all agree is a sister to pain anyway. More than once, I’ve got halfway to finishing a quest only to watch my partners veer from the goal—tempted by the prospect of a messy teamfight. With little to lose, there’s much less hesitation in the air. Players are eager to get into scraps at the expense of whatever they might have been doing beforehand.

One dying teammate chuckled as I fruitlessly finished off an opponent in the Marsh’s quarantine zone, dooming myself to death by machine gun fire in the process. “At least you got him! Well done.” It’s a tone of carefree abandon I’ve never previously associated with Marathon.

At the same time, I’ve witnessed a drastic decrease in team bonding. Outside of Free Kit Frenzy, the Marathon community is often collaborative and helpful. Everyone is vaguely aware that the wellbeing of the players they’re matchmade with has a significant bearing on their own. Strangers tend to stick together, defend one another, get on the same page, and most importantly, ping those bloody awful toxic plants that strip the HP from your bones.

That’s much less the case within the bounds of Bungie’s new social experiment. Once players are killed, they don’t tend to wait around for a revive—instead disconnecting immediately to start a fresh round (a very battle royale behaviour). Their personal investment in a match is lower, and thus their investment in the team is weaker too. You can hardly blame them—though naturally I do, in the moments when I’m left alone, with the thunder of enemy foodsteps filling my headphones.

There have definitely been points where I’m grateful to have Free Kit Frenzy in rotation. After a brutal loss, it’s an appealing option that negates the need for more extreme measures like ‘processing feelings’ or ‘touching grass’.

Still: a part of me wonders whether this new mode has given me a comfort I ought not to have. As a level 40 player, now hoarding shields and stuffing my wallet with excess credits, I’m relying on Bungie to keep my hubris in check. Part of my role, now, is to be the whale that a newer player harpoons. The piñata they’re sometimes lucky enough to crack open, gasping with delight as they rip out my fancy implants. In that context, being able to leave my kit at home for 50% of my runs seems somehow against the spirit of the game.

In fact, one of the pitfalls of Free Kit Frenzy is that, very often, there are no piñatas. Some of my most lucrative Marathon runs have come from the winnings of a kitted-up player's backpack—the rewards proportional to the risk. Free kit fights are fairer, but when the prize is typically the same gun I'm holding plus a few med kits, I actually have fewer interesting reasons to open fire. Asymmetry is what makes an extraction shooter distinct from a deathmatch with an off ramp.

Evidently, Bungie is wary of compromising the core appeal of Marathon. That’ll be why Free Kit Frenzy is temporary, and limited to a single map. The studio will be analysing feedback, and there’s every chance this very article will become a data point. In which case, Bungie: please take care in diluting the wide-eyed electricity of Marathon; the crackling atmosphere you’ve conjured, rooted fundamentally in fear.

More than anything, Free Kit Frenzy feels like a safe out. And as anyone who’s ever been jumped during exfil can tell you, a safe out is not quite Marathon.

Since Marathon launched, one gun has dominated both the battlefield and the discourse. No, I don't mean the Biotoxic Disinjector, which while ferociously powerful, is unlikely to appear outside of Cryo Archive due to its rarity. I'm instead referring to the almighty WSTR shotgun, by far the best weapon to carry in your back pocket as you explore Tau Ceti IV

Marathon's double-barrelled delete key is so powerful that it has already been nerfed once, with a dramatic reduction in range making it virtually useless outside of close encounters. But it remains the most effective solution to any encounter where you can see the decals beneath an enemy runner's eyes.

Indeed, the WSTR's dominance of the secondary weapon slot has become a source of concern for Bungie, and as such they're planning to nerf the shotgun a second time. Come Tuesday, WSTR-wielding players will need to work a bit harder against players equipped with strong shields.

"We're gonna take a shot at bringing the WSTR more in line," Marathon's game director Joe Ziegler wrote in a Steam post on Saturday. "Right now, it's become a dominant option and is eclipsing a lot of the other short range options that exist in the game."

As such, Tuesday's update will tweak the WSTR so that it can no longer down an enemy runner equipped with a blue shield (or above) in two shots. Ziegler explained his reasoning: "The ideal is that in the majority of cases this will force a reload in scenarios where the target has a blue shield, allowing for more counterplay in these scenarios."

Ziegler notes that the WSTR will still be able to knock down players equipped with green shields in two shots, meaning it will remain a powerful option for players exploring the earlier maps where green shields are most common. Frankly, I think this is the right call. The WSTR a great weapon for leveling the playing field as a newer player, and a real treat when you get one. But you shouldn't be relying on it by the time you're exploring places like Outpost. You need to be able to adapt.

Bungie has shown it isn't afraid to take big swings with Marathon's meta, and I'm enjoying watching it shift and evolve enormously. Its ongoing sponsored kits only experiment has been a ton of fun so far, limiting all players to a free loadout for a more carefree extraction experience. It's also grimly amusing how its recently added Mercy Kits—designed to let players revive downed rivals—are instead being used to murder players twice. That's Marathon, folks.

Just over a year after laying off 66 employees in what the studio said was was a "last resort" effort to "enable our long term survival," Iron Galaxy, the developer of games including Killer Instinct seasons 2 and 3, Rumbleverse, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4, has announced that it is once again "reducing our company size."

"A number of teammates and friends are losing their jobs as we adjust to a new company structure," the studio wrote in a message on LinkedIn. "We are terribly sorry to lose them as we take steps to adapt to the climate of the video game industry. It’s time for us to evolve again."

Iron Galaxy pointed to changes in the videogame industry that began in 2020 as the driving force behind this round of cuts, saying that after years of waiting for things "to get back to normal"—an attitude that's been held by the business at large, not just Iron Galaxy—"we’re adopting a new posture to accept these current market conditions as permanent."

"As Iron Galaxy adapts, we must make painful decisions about what we can be as a company," the studio wrote. "It’s impossible for us to sustain the team size that we’ve carried this past year, even after our downsizing from last year."

That's alarming, given the dire situation portrayed by Iron Galaxy when those layoffs happened. "This was a means of last resort for us," the studio said at the time. "It’s a measure we do not take lightly to enable our long-term survival." Yet clearly it was not enough.

Iron Galaxy didn't say how many people were let go, but included among them is former communications lead David Dague, well known to gamers for his long tenure as "Deej," Bungie's community manager and communications. Dague left Bungie in 2020, and joined Iron Galaxy shortly after.

"It has been a pleasure to work for Iron Galaxy for more than five years," Dague wrote in his own layoff message. "I’d like to thank the leadership and my now former colleagues for providing an amazing professional experience. We did some things together I’ll always be proud of and remember fondly. This is a company that has always lived their values out loud. That will continue. I wish them well, and I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll work together again someday."

Iron Galaxy caused a stir in March when it posted a social media message containing the "please stand by" screen from Fallout: New Vegas, leading fans (well, me, anyway) to speculate that it might be working on a long-awaited New Vegas remaster. The studio later shot down that speculation, saying it uses that slide for its meetings every month.

Marathon's had a few experimental matchmaking options since launch, namely a duos queue so you and a buddy can scavenger without a tag-along. After the success of this experiment, Bungie's making duos a permanent fixture in Season 2. And with that, testing something else in the labs: 'free kit frenzy', running from now until Wednesday, 29 April.

Bungie's aim with this experiment is to find out more about "the early gear system", since players are forced to enter with a free sponsored kit, using what they find during the match to get by and extract. In other words, it's basically a battle royale mode. Any loot you manage to escape with you can use in the main mode, but you can't bring it back into the next free kit frenzy match. It's a great opportunity to grab gear for the standard mode or complete contracts more peacefully.

What's most interesting is that this test, which was just meant to give Bungie some data on looting and gear, has been remarkably successful so far. "Dire Marsh sponsored [queue] is sick…Everyone seems to be in the same place, and even losing isn't as frustrating", one player said in a Reddit post, which is overflowing with further support for the mode in the comments: "Really do hope they keep this mode in".

Free kit que might be the most fun I've had so far in Marathon from r/Marathon

One of the biggest advantages of this mode is that there are a lot fewer snipers, shotguns, and bubble shields in use, which have been met with their fair share of hatred since launch. And if you do find one, you've got to make the most of it because you won't be bringing it to the next free kit frenzy match anyhow.

Honestly, it's funny that this test has ended up quickly morphing into players hoping the experimental playlist stays, effectively adding a permanent battle royale. Bungie's decision to make it an extraction shooter, especially one so hardcore, has been controversial ever since it was announced, resulting in Marathon being its own worst enemy. The success of this test suggests that there's at least room for Marathon to be an extraction shooter while also accommodating a more lax, battle royale crowd.

Coinciding with the free kit frenzy experiment, Marathon's mid-season patch launched yesterday, buffing Recon, giving everyone a Mercy Kit to revive strangers, and even adding a bunch of unique weapons.

Marathon's mid-season patch is here, and it's ended up bigger than anticipated. Those Recon buffs Bungie's been talking up for ages have arrived, allowing Marathon's resident snitch to differentiate between bots and players when scanning the map. The tracker drone is also better at tracking now, so it should be more than just occasionally helpful.

What wasn't expected in today's patch are 11 new Deluxe weapon variants added to the loot pool on all maps. These are blue-rarity uniques, so not quite as fancy as the gold ones that pop up exclusively in Cryo Archive, but they do have special names and inherent bonuses you can't recreate with your own attachments.

Presumably not wanting to spoil the surprises, Bungie provided just one example of a Deluxe unique. The BR33 "Victory Lap" is a variant of the Volley Rifle with a unique bonus of:

• +10 Stability
• +30 Range
• +10 Accuracy
• +30 Reload Speed
• +30 Move Speed
• +40 ADS Speed
• +20 Equip Speed
• +10 Aim Assist

Uh yeah, that sounds very strong. Safe to say if you see a blue unique, it's probably better than whatever kitted gun you're holding.

The other major addition that earned its own dedicated blog post is the CARRI protocol, a commendation system running through the end of Season 1 that rewards solo and team players for completing contracts.

"Earn CyberAcme Commendations for your successes, then spend this new material at the C.A.R.R.I. Armory to unlock weapons, Reputation Packs which grant reputation for their associated faction, and more," the blog reads.

I'm personally excited for the introduction of the Mercy Kit, a new consumable that lets you revive strangers out in the wild. The Mercy Kit only works on players outside of your crew and can't be used on yourself, which means its entire purpose is to potentially make nice with rival players or form an alliance with Rooks. It's unclear how commonly the Mercy Kit will be found on maps, but all Rooks will now spawn with one by default. The possibility of a friendly resolution should make Rook-on-Rook showdowns a lot more interesting going forward.

There's also three new weapon universal weapon chips:

• Common Enemy: Damaging enemy combatants causes them to take increased damage from allied or enemy Runners for a short duration.
• Pocket Change: Reloading quickly after a kill or down drops ammo of this weapon’s type.
• Exit Buddy: Downing or killing an enemy grants you and nearby allies increased movement speed with equipped weapons for a short duration.
• And five new implant perks:
• Group Therapy: Using a medical item grants you and nearby allies a stacking bonus to your Self-Repair Speed for a short time.
• Herd Immunity: Defeating hostiles grants you and nearby allies a stacking bonus to Hardware and Firewall stats for a short time.
• Fight Club: Striking hostiles with a melee or knife attack grants you and nearby allies a stacking bonus to Melee Damage for a short time.
• Divebomb: When you damage an enemy with explosives, you and nearby allies gain a large temporary boost to Agility.
• Evasive Maneuvers: When your shields break, you and nearby allies gain increased sprint speed and Heat Capacity for a short time.

Then there's nerfs. The SMG that's so powerful and abundant that it outshines most other guns in the game, the Bully, got nerfed in nine different ways that mostly concern its overly generous aim assist:

• Base aim assist falloff start decreased from 13m to 12m.
• Base aim assist falloff end decreased from 24.2m to 22.5m.
• Base magnetism falloff start decreased from 30m to 27.8m.
• Base magnetism falloff end decreased from 37.1m to 34.5m.
• Max aim assist falloff start decreased from 40m to 37.2m.
• Max aim assist falloff end decreased from 80m to 74.4m.
• Max magnetism falloff start decreased from 93m to 86.4m.
• Max magnetism falloff end decreased from 101m to 93.9m.
• Increased error cone size by 7.5%.

Thermal scopes and the Longshot sniper rifle were knocked down a peg as well in an effort to generally decrease sniper dominance in wide-open spaces like Dire Marsh. Thermals in particular should be far less common from now on:

Removed all Deluxe rarity thermal optics across all weapon archetypes from the loot tables and they can no longer drop.

Superior SP Scope III sniper optics now decreases aim assist and range stats in addition to the ADS speed penalties.

Decreased Superior SP Scope III sniper optics thermal highlight range from 100m to 80m.

Longshot

• Decreased accuracy when firing rapidly to better reward more methodically paced shots.
• Decreased rate of fire from 90rpm to 60rpm.
• Fixed a bug that allowed the Kingmaker Mag Prestige mod to trigger when shooting teammates.

On the cosmetics front, those promised extra battle pass rewards have arrived alongside a grip of Arachne shell skins earned through sponsor kits. But maybe the most impactful "small" change is a visual pass on all implants. Head, body, and leg implants actually look different in your vault now (thank god), though you'll still need to mouse over implants of the same type to tell them apart.

That's the highlights, but if you're a Marathon player it's worth combing over the full patch notes for more on gun nerfs and details on the CARRI Protocol event.

Marathon is running another experimental playlist ahead of its next balancing patch. Following successful tests of a duos mode that Bungie plans to make a "real feature" in Season 2, the next playlist introduces what game director Joe Ziegler calls a "free kit frenzy."

"For our next experiment, starting Wednesday, 4/15 at 10 am PT, we will be enabling the Dire Marsh - Sponsored Queue. This is a new experimental queue that is focused on learning a bit more about our early gear ecosystem," Ziegler wrote in an official update. "In this queue all players will enter with a free sponsored kit and be challenged to use what they find on Dire Marsh to upgrade themselves and get out!"

The Sponsored Queue is essentially the inverse of its Ranked and Cryo Archive playlists which set a high minimum loadout value to participate. Here, the required buy-in is zero credits, which Bungie calls a "zero to hero" format.

The test will run for two weeks (4/15 to 4/29) on Dire Marsh only, though Bungie may extend or cut short that timing depending on how things go. As for what the team hopes to get out of it, Ziegler says it will be "observing and looking to understand" the following:

• How the game plays out with low fixed set gear conditions and caps
• How the zero to hero play works in low starting set gear conditions and caps
• Any technical issues that arise

It's an intriguing format, and at least one PC Gamer contributor is excited for the "stress-free" implications of a sponsored kit mandate. I am, however, skeptical it'll result in meaningfully different matches than what we have now. As it stands, there are already free sponsored kit players sprinkled among paid loadouts in the average Marathon lobby, so it's not as if low-stakes matchups are new.

What a free kit requirement does have are certain guarantees that could inform playstyles, such as the knowledge that I won't get sniped by a thermal scope Longshot 60 seconds into the match or be jumped by a full squad of purple-shielded freaks with shotguns. With the small pool of grey-tier weapons handed out in free kits, the Sponsored Queue will be the only true equalized playlist in Marathon, and that alone makes this an experiment worth having, I reckon.

The test will coincide with Marathon's next significant balancing patch—the one that will finally buff the fan favorite, but underpowered, Recon shell.

Marathon just completed its second full week since the rollout of its Ranked competitive mode, and despite the mind-boggling complexity of its holotag system, its players have been confronting a simple problem: When a game has ranks, players will cheat to climb them.

Since its launch, reports of Ranked cheaters have become so prevalent that some streamers are calling the mode "ruined"—a sentiment echoed by frustrated runners on the Marathon subreddit. Today, Bungie responded to those piling complaints, saying it's already been banning cheaters when it detects them and will be continually refining its tools to do so.

"We have a zero-tolerance policy around cheating," Bungie said in an update on X, reiterating the one-strike-you're-out permaban protocol it had laid out ahead of launch in February. "We're actively banning confirmed cheaters and expanding our telemetry and detection methods to better catch the aforementioned cheaters."

The studio says some of those improved detection tools have already gone live, with further improvements expected in the weeks ahead.

"Anti-cheat is a continuous cycle of monitoring, improving, and responding. This is an area that we will continue to invest in to protect the integrity of your runs," Bungie said.

Bungie said it's also "iterating" on making it easier for players to flag suspected cheating and report toxicity, both in-game and through its reporting website. It's also investigating the possibility of sending an in-game mailbox message when action is taken as a result of a player report you've submitted. It's nice to get confirmation that somebody's facing repercussions for being awful, after all.

Better voice moderation options for handling habitually toxic chat behavior and stream sniping protections are on the studio's to-do list as well. In the meantime, Bungie's encouraging runners to "please keep reporting" cheating and harassment as it appears.

"It all feeds into the systems and people working to keep Tau Ceti fair," Bungie said.

Marathon's Cryo Archive endgame map is stuffed with juicy, high-tier loot for Runners to shove into their backpacks. But by far the most prized item in Bungie's formidable lose everything factory is the Biotoxic Disinjector. This unique red-tier weapon, acquired by defeating Marathon's endgame boss The Compiler, can incinerate rival Runners with a laser beam or blast them to smithereens with a grenade launcher alt-fire.

It's a tremendously powerful gun. Too powerful, it turns out. Over the weekend, Bungie rolled out a small but significant update that carves a big chunk of damage out of this endgame weapon.

"Biotoxic Disinjector. It's strong! … too strong." Wrote Marathon's Game Director Joe Ziegler in a Steam post, adding that Bungie would be nerfing the weapon's damage by 35%. He stressed that this change was not necessarily final, however. "We're likely to make some adjustments to Biotox in the near future and may not stick to this damage nerf but for now we wanted to make sure we could curb a little bit of its dominion in the game."

Reducing the Disinjector's damage by more than a third might seem dramatic. But it's reflective of just how much of an advantage the weapon conveys—particularly its grenade launcher mode. Not only does it deal explosive damage at a high rate of fire, its projectiles also bounce off walls and stick to enemy players, making them incredibly difficult to avoid.

"People keep turning up with the Biotoxic Disinjector and spamming the 'nades and instakilling the entire team in seconds," explained Marathon player Rawssy in a reddit post written shortly before then nerf. User LJE_Shot1 concurs. "The fact you never ever see people use the laser mode says a lot, yet still get massive run time out of the gun."

The reaction to the nerf has been largely positive, though some players are complaining that it doesn't go far enough. "Nerf didn't do anything." Writes MadBuc, while futon_potato says "35% isn't even a Band-Aid. It's like putting a loose piece of cheap toilet paper on it."

Part of the issue seems to be not just the weapon's power, but its availability. It was originally much harder to acquire, due to the fact that one of the key items to access to the Compiler boss—Subroutines—didn't always spawn. But Bungie changed this a few weeks back, which has had a knock-on effect of endgame weapons appearing much more frequently in Cryo.

It's an interesting dilemma. In such a competitive, high-stakes game, how do you effectively reward players for completing a challenge like Cryo Archive, without making the experience worse for everyone else? It seems like Bungie isn't wholly convinced that a straight damage nerf will solve the problem, so it'll be interesting to see if any further changes arrive in the coming weeks.

Recon is my favourite Shell to play as in Marathon, so I was surprised to learn that she is considered one of the weaker characters in Bungie's extraction shooter. This is true both for the PC Gamer team and, apparently, Bungie themselves. Yesterday, game director Joe Ziegler revealed that Marathon's intelligence-focussed Shell would be getting "more oomph", alongside other changes like similar buffs for Vandal and a nerf to Marathon's knife.

Ziegler didn't reveal the specifics behind the Shell tweaks, intending to save them for when their respective patches arrive. But in the spirit of Recon, players' desire for knowledge was simply too strong for Bungie to resist, as the developer has offered a sneak peek at the changes coming to the shooter's weakest shell.

"As part of our mid-season update planned for April 14, we've got some notable changes and updates on the way," the Marathon Development Team wrote on X. "But by popular demand we wanted to share just a few early—specifically, a preview of some of the Recon changes that are incoming."

Bungie revealed two changes coming to Recon, the first of which is a significant tweak to her Echo Pulse ability. This power lets Recon briefly scan the environment for hostiles, identifying their approximate positions via little red diamonds on the HUD. But with the changes coming on April 14, Recon's Echo Pulse will now identify whether that hostile is an AI controlled UESC robot or a human runner.

As part of this change, Bungie is making Echo Pulse less visible to enemies, making it tougher for enemy Runners "to gauge if they're in range." Depending on the extent of the adjustment, this could be a bigger deal than human/AI delineation. You can often tell the difference between UESC and human players as Recon anyway by watching how they move, but there's not much you can do about the big yellow-green wave that emanates from your position.

Enemy Runners do have a potential counter to this power boost, though. Using the Signal Jammer before being hit by Echo Pulse will make them show up as UESC, letting them potentially turn the tables on Recon. The other major adjustment is to Recon's tracker drone, which Bungie says is "about to get a bit more aggressive". Specifically, Bungie is changing it so that it can select a new target if it cannot reach its current target.

This should help alleviate frustrating moments when Recon's spider buddy gets stuck on a random piece of nearby geometry, resulting in it often blowing up uselessly and, occasionally, causing damage to yourself. I can see this change, having issues of its own if there are lots of potential targets in an area, though hopefully Bungie have already taken this into account.

All of this should put Recon on a more even standing with other Shells, and is obviously exciting for me personally. As for the changes Bungie has in store for Vandal and elsewhere, I'm sure we'll find out about those soon enough.

Amidst yesterday's yearly crop of April Fool's japery, Marathon game director Joe Ziegler broke from seasonal convention on X by sharing an early, fool-free preview of balance adjustments Bungie has planned for upcoming patches in the weeks ahead.

With tweaks planned for weapons, attachments, deployables, runner shells, and more, Ziegler said the wide-ranging slate of updates is intended "to adjust some of the outliers in the combat space that we've both seen in our observations and heard from your feedback across all of the various (and plentiful) channels we watch."

Gear balance seems like a major focus of current Marathon retuning efforts. Bungie's concluded that bubble shields and thermal scopes are too accessible for how dominant they've proven to be in firefights, Ziegler says. Likewise, Snipers—which Ziegler says are "too strong in all scenarios"—are due for a nerf.

Also primed for a depowering is the knife, which Ziegler has acknowledged is currently "scaling too easily to god-like power levels." Considering it only takes a couple upgrades before you're better off bringing a knife to a Tau Ceti gunfight, that's probably a safe call.

Some runner shells, meanwhile, will be getting the opposite treatment, as Vandal and Recon players should soon be enjoying "some more oomph to match their counterparts." Hopefully that extra bit of oomph will mean my tracker drone spends a bit more time exploding anyone but me.

Ziegler also teased a pair of secret new features Bungie is adding to inject some more variety into how firefights can pan out: a "new item to give solos a more common option when downed" and "a new item to give a more merciful option between crews." I'm not sure what mercy might look like when Marathon's interactions skew so hostile, but I'm interested to see it.

We should start seeing these balance changes arrive before long, as they'll be split between Marathon's next patch and another that will follow a week later. And that's evidently not all Bungie has in store, because Ziegler says there will be "a lot more goodies in the coming patches," promising more details when the inevitable patch notes arrive.

"Thank you all again for keeping the feedback flowing," Ziegler said. "We've still got a big list of things we're looking into that extends beyond this that will take us more time to figure out and we'll update you as we continue to build on our evolving plans."

With its latest patch for Marathon, Bungie has decided that the haunting, derelict expanse of Tau Ceti IV is stressful enough without any adrenaline-crazed acrobats launching themselves across your screen like frenzied, gun-toting cybergibbons. Marathon is now, officially, a No Movement Freak Zone.

In its patch notes for Marathon update 1.0.5.2, Bungie says it's fixed a movement exploit that had been allowing players to generate unintended levels of momentum by sliding into and cancelling equipment or ability animations like the Thief's grapple device. And the studio says we should expect a similar zero-tolerance policy on movement exploits going forward.

Bungie said that by allowing players to launch themselves at high speeds with little drawback, the slide cancel exploit broke a central tenet of its design theory: Nobody gets to engage in freak behavior for free.

"One of our core philosophies for Marathon is that rapid repositioning and aggression must always have a meaningful cost. That cost can be an ability charge, heat buildup, or increased risk but it must exist and be understandable to an observer," Bungie said in the patch notes. "Unbounded movement, while expressive and clip-worthy, is ultimately unhealthy for the pace of play we want to maintain for Marathon. To set expectations early, we will be looking at any future movement exploits through the same lens."

Thief players can still use the grapple ability for a one-off boost of momentum, but doing so will now incur an ability cooldown where the previous movement exploit hadn't.

While we should spare a moment of silence for those in the Marathon highlight reel ecosystem who must once again remain within intended velocity margins, I think I speak for many when I say: Thank god. Nothing turns me off a shooter like the idea of having to contend with high-intensity combat contortionists. I'm an honest man and I expect to be murdered in honest ways.

If I ambush you with a shotgun, I guarantee it'll be at a respectable, pedestrian pace. Hopefully you'll return the courtesy. It's only neighborly.

The nice thing about letting a multiplayer shooter marinate for a few weeks before putting a score on it is that I've learned what being high and low on Marathon is like.

I've had triumphant nights of tens of thousands in valuables plundered, pried rare guns off the blue-stained corpses of rival squads, and enjoyed a vault resplendent with expensive attachments. I've also visited Marathon rock bottom: a cold, unyielding cycle of squad wipes that will almost convince you that Bungie is conspiring against your successful extraction. I've scraped together loadouts with my last 3,000 credits just to lose it all, and debased myself with Rook runs into hot zones to take home whatever scraps of Biomass were passed over by richer players.

Marathon is brutal. It's also a marvel.

Rampant fun

After respecting Destiny from a distance and gritting my teeth over storied FPS makers leaving old school multiplayer behind, I didn't anticipate that an extraction shooter would be the perfect container for the things Bungie has always done well. Where other competitive shooters squeeze storytelling into the margins, Marathon is drenched in lore.

I approach Marathon like most likely will: completely oblivious to the beloved '90s FPSes where Bungie honed its craft and established a mythology around AI, aliens, and cosmic mysticism that'd later inform the worlds of Halo and Destiny. The very first being in this game is an AI who breaks the news that I've left my mortal coil behind. Like other freelancers I've, uh, "evolved" into a digital consciousness uploaded to a server in a spaceship—unbound from a physical body and free to embody disposable "shells" in contracted runs on the planet Tau Ceti IV, the site of a human colony that vanished without explanation.

The work is hard, the pay is often crap, I've experienced death a hundred times, and I'm in debt—but hey, at least I make my own hours.

Marathon is right up there with Hunt: Showdown in its ability to distill the intensity of extraction shooter fights into repeatable, delectable chunks. And yet it also excels at an Escape From Tarkov brand of loot lust: compounding anxiety and adrenaline as my backpack fills up with stuff I'd sure like not to lose. The way it achieves that PvP focus while still emphasizing loot tells me that Bungie has thought a lot about extraction shooters: Instead of drawing players together with a singular target the whole lobby competes for, Marathon shrinks the average map size for this sort of game.

With just a handful of compounds on Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost (the endgame raid map, Cryo Archive, is its own beast), you're always bound to run into somebody even though nobody shares the same exact goals. The result is, as I wrote after launch, an extraction format where PvP gets to be the star, but itemized loot establishes the stakes:

"So now I see the vision. Because most contracts can be completed in just a few minutes, Marathon matches have this bouncy quality where a three-person squad hits up a handful of compounds so everyone can check off their task—and share in the XP—while having a very good chance of scrapping with other teams along the way. You can have a complete Marathon experience in like 15 minutes and then matchmake into another one in seconds."

It's really great, and what binds it all together is the specific choice to have a short time-to-kill. "Short" is somewhat relative here—Marathon doesn't share a universal one-shot-headshot rule like Hunt or Rainbow Six Siege, but it often takes less than a magazine of ammo to knock players. Even shields, which I feared might make everyone so tanky that fights become a slog, only buy a few extra bullets of health. There's little room for error, but that's why Marathon rewards squads that tread carefully.

House style

Rough nights have left me questioning if extraction shooters are really worth the trouble—if the inconsistency of an "all or nothing" format is a healthy use of gaming time when attempting to unwind after work. Sometimes the answer is no, and that's when I put Marathon back on the shelf, but the promise of the next standout gunfight reels me back in.

Bungie's first game in nine years has reminded me what it means for a studio to have a "house style". I'm not just talking about an eye for world building, gorgeous environments and skyboxes, or a dense codex that inspires main menu idling—I'm talking raw first-person shooting excellence.

A Bungie game really does hit different: Marathon's guns are rhythmic, rewarding instruments with simple recoil patterns that can comfortably fire from the hip. Amidst a genre that's trending toward high speed and "schmovement" techniques, Marathon's low gravity, bouncy physics, and methodical boot clunks echo Master Chief's graceful, weighty gait circa 2004. It's got modern conveniences like aim-down-sights, sprinting, sliding—and yet Marathon evokes a more civilized age.

Those qualities make it more accessible to a range of people who struggle to keep up in faster games while maintaining a skill range in other disciplines: timing, positioning, and perception. It's fairly easy to track targets, but you're still rewarded for nailing headshots, taking the high ground, and utilizing shell abilities. Does that make Marathon an unc game? You decide, but as a freshly minted literal uncle, it does speak to me.

Space age

Despite the embarrassing, reputation-strangling art theft that rattled Bungie last year, Marathon has come out the other side one of the most original-looking games I've ever seen. Tau Ceti's intersection of nature and artifice immediately grabbed my eyeballs and refused to let go. It's a CMYK wonderland of rounded edges and soft lighting conceived with readability and beauty in mind—a balance that's increasingly rare in a genre that values competitive integrity above all else.

Especially as I dive into open-world RPG Crimson Desert in my downtime, Marathon strikes me as the best argument in ages that "photoreal" is grossly overrated. Tau Ceti's environments are fairly simple under a microscope, but they're carried by top-notch color choices, materials work, and some breathtaking weather effects that don't require 5080 to render. To play this game is to routinely happen across a room, a vista, a piece of graffiti, or an inscrutable treasure that grinds my run to a halt so I may appreciate its strangeness.

Bungie retains its adoration for bullpup rifles and irresponsibly large magnums, but I appreciate that not even a bog-standard assault rifle gets to look normal: weapons are inherently incongruent, colorful objects whose aesthetics straddle a line between 3D print and literal Legos. My favorites of the bunch might be the Volt guns: a lineup of energy weapons whose squared profiles are constructed around the long, flat battery cartridges that power them. The Punch pistol feels like I'm shooting an iPad, and it's a delight every time. I also grab the Brrt SMG whenever it's available simply because I adore the tiny cubic clip that ejects from its top intake with each reload.

But what I love most about Marathon's guns is that each one has a place in its Halo-shaped sandbox. I've lambasted every Call of Duty of the last decade (and Battlefield 6 by extension) for vomiting up a pile of 60 guns every year that have zero character and behave exactly the same. They only exist to facilitate grinding, lend the appearance of having more stuff, and to sell more skins. Marathon's 28 launch guns actually aspire to fill a niche and draw meaningful distinctions beyond archetypes: Volt guns drain shields faster than bullets and can recharge over time, but reloading early dumps its remaining energy. Heavy ammo guns hit harder at the cost of fire rate and recoil. Precision rifles have a higher native headshot multiplier to reward accuracy but ensure automatic guns are better up close.

That will all be familiar to Destiny fans, but Marathon also leverages mechanisms unique to extraction shooters to create counterbalance. Shotguns and snipers are dominant power weapons in every match, but they're harder to acquire, mods are rarer, and their MIPS ammo is expensive and only stacks 15 rounds. That's all before you factor in mods, which can totally transform a weapon's firing behavior, or just make the Volt Thrower supercombine like a Needler.

Foreign body

There's a real confidence in the way Marathon sees Tau Ceti IV not just as a venue for PvP, but a rabbit hole of scattered dramas to enjoy at my convenience. This game has a codex with hundreds of entires—thousands of words providing context for everything from the true purpose of that esoteric Data Wall splitting the Perimeter map in half to the NuCaloric drinkable cheeseburgers pilfered from lunch boxes.

I need to underline Marathon's optional text chats and audio logs, because they're a card that's been in Bungie's deck for decades, but it may work better here than it ever has before. I love that, instead of tucking away little side stories in terminals that interrupt the flow of the story already happening in front of me, Marathon's non-linear storytelling gets to be the main narrative thrust of this world. The absence of a traditional campaign lends greater credibility to logs I'd usually gloss over, and it's stuff that's actually fascinating to pick apart in breaks between matches or in those idle minutes waiting for friends to buy their gear.

Objects that are otherwise only impressive for their sell value unfold into layered anecdotes from the human settlers of Tau Ceti, chipping away at a larger story about corporate greed, AI hubris, and the pure intentions snuffed out by capitalism.

Runners are disposable, indebted pawns of a world with like five corporations left. The shells we inhabit as temporary bodies are printed by techno moths. Everything we accomplish, though personally satisfying, serves the whims of a humanity-barren executive speaking through a pane of frosted glass. One of these faction handlers sits atop a throne aside a digital lion. Another is a literal worm. It's pretty good sci-fi.

Zone clear

Much of Marathon's strengths could be considered great executions of stuff other games already do, but there's nothing quite like Marathon's maps. Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost are smaller than the average extraction playgrounds with a purpose: fewer compounds with dense, extravagant layouts make Marathon's maps easy to learn and satisfying to master.

Outpost, for all its brutality, may be Marathon's masterpiece: The first human settlement established on Tau Ceti IV, Outpost is the last base map unlocked at level 12. It's essentially one huge compound made up of factories, dormitories, and air hangars, but that's just the first layer of what's essentially two maps. Hovering in judgement over the entire zone is the Pinwheel, an imposing three-pronged megastructure that can only be accessed by finding security cards on the map and chewing through a bunch of robots.

There are something like five or six different ways to get into the Pinwheel, some less obvious than others. It's brilliant, and it's among the most unique and interactive spaces I've explored in a competitive shooter. If you get in, some of the best loot in the game is waiting for you, but so are other teams who've infiltrated from other wings.

Then there's Cryo Archive, the fourth "raid" map. In a handful of runs through the UESC Marathon over the weekend, I was smitten with the clever ways Bungie has married raid mechanics with a PvP environment. Cryo has special conditions to access areas like Outpost, but taken to the extreme: a unique Security Clearance rating determines where you can and can't go. Teams gain clearance by looting security tags, but you're not likely to find enough to reach the inner workings of the facility (or even find an extraction point) without stealing more from players. I've yet to solve vault puzzles or fight the Compiler, but I look forward to it.

Turnaround

If there's one major worry I have for Marathon (despite a general anxiety around how often great games get shut down), it's what happens after Season 1 is over. Come June, Marathon sees its first seasonal wipe. I've never played an extraction shooter with forced wipes—Hunt and Arc Raiders make it optional, and I've never felt motivated to reset all of my upgrades and purge my vault. When that day comes in Marathon, I wonder if I'll want to take another lap around its systems.

That will depend on the quality of new additions coming down the pipe. As remarkable as Marathon's four existing maps are, it could really use a few more to round out the package. Season 2 will have a new shell, guns, and enemies, but on the maps front, only a night variant of Dire Marsh.

Yes, the UI is imperfect. Yep, that first battle pass is a big dud. And we all agree(?) the double-barrel WSTR shotgun is a bit much. There's actually a long list of ways Marathon could be better, like copying Hunt's loadout system so jumping back into a kitted match takes seconds instead of minutes, or catering better to solo players so Assassin isn't the best choice in every single circumstance—but honestly, I'm having such a great time otherwise that these fall under little gripes. I'm happy so far with how quickly Bungie has addressed immediate issues.

If you're surprised Marathon turned out this well, I'm with ya. This time last year, I had all but written it off after trying that dreadful alpha with the cartoony art, no solo mode, and no prox chat. But Bungie made great changes and clearly knew what it had that other extraction shooters didn't: spectacular gunplay, second-to-none maps, and progression systems that turned me around on this loot-heavy format entirely. Marathon doesn't just join my FPS rotation, for the foreseeable future it is my FPS rotation.

Part of me was dreading the arrival of Marathon's fourth map, Cryo Archive. The promise of an endgame zone that resembled the puzzle box raids Bungie is known for sounded amazing, but I wasn't sold on the fun of getting shotgunned in the back by a kitted-up Assassin while just trying to sort out a locked door. Maybe Marathon would benefit from a purely PvE zone to balance out its ruthlessness?

I should've had a little more faith in Bungie. Cryo Archive is an astounding labyrinth across a haunted planet-sized spaceship that plays nothing like the other three maps in Marathon, nor like any other competitive map in shooters period. It bridges the gap between PvE and PvP brilliantly, and makes me wonder why this is the first game of its type to have this much fun with map design.

If you've yet to venture into the "lose everything factory", Cryo Archive is a weekends-only event map with special requirements for entry: You must be level 25, unlock all six factions, play with a full squad of three (no Rooks allowed), and build a loadout worth at least 5,000 credits.

Bungie calls it an "endgame" experience, which is misleading, as you can play it long before you max out your rep with factions or even become particularly rich. It's better to think of Cryo Archive as the last "big" thing to do in Marathon before you've essentially seen it all—though I've barely scratched the surface of this gargantuan map after a handful of runs.

Teams are dropped into opposite corners of the snaking cryo facility, and the first thing you learn is that doors do not simply open here. Cryo has a unique "Security Clearance" mechanic (that it forces you to figure out yourself, of course) that unlocks more of the map as you raise your clearance. Security Clearance is essentially how Bungie injects progression into this non-linear raid: the only way to increase clearance is to loot UESC bots, hack certain terminals, or steal clearance tags from other players.

I envisioned Cryo Archive would be like the first 12 seconds of a battle royale match where everyone runs to a hot zone and half of the lobby is dead before I've applied sunscreen. It's actually the opposite: Unlike Marathon's other three maps, you're literally locked away from other teams for at least the first 10-15 minutes as everyone fights through waves of bots in the wing they've spawned in. It's not until you get at least one clearance level that you reach Control, a multi-level central chamber that connects every wing.

It's really cool how making that transition from the relative safety of cramped hallways into Control is a choice, like you're opting into the next phase of this raid as a group. Once you're there, yes, the PvP is as intense as I feared, but it's not all that crowded. The map itself is massive and the sightlines are short, so in a handful of runs I've yet to fight more than one team at a time.

We also haven't even gotten close to "completing" Cryo, or even solving its puzzles. Those are locked away in special vaults that require batteries (another currency unique to the map) to enter. But it's fascinating that you don't have to engage with that stuff to have a fulfilling match, because there's amazing loot everywhere. It's clear why Bungie implemented the 5,000 credit stake—within minutes of entering with a green shield and a decent gun you can easily upgrade to purple everything.

But even played as a straight "make some dough" map, nothing is straightforward. Extracting is a multi-step process that requires clearance level 3. Then you have to find a terminal that might or might not reveal an extraction point, then you have to trigger it, and then hoof it across the map to the exfil without getting lost. And wow, it is easy to get lost! Yesterday I ran into a room with too much gusto and nearly stepped into an infinite Emperor Palpatine death pit. Before that our crew rode an elevator up to a room that kills you—like it literally kills you unless you're packing the right anti-toxicity consumables (wouldn't that be nice to have online).

It's terrifying. It's confusing. It's amazing. I dig it. It's possible I ended up losing credits overall, but at least I escaped with a bunch of rare upgrade materials, XP, and good stories.

I'd like to see the full extent of its weirdness some day soon, but Bungie has some adjustments to make first: the weekends only thing is unnecessarily alienating to Saturday/Sunday workers and parents with better stuff to do. There's gotta be a better way to make Cryo Archive a "sometimes" thing. And the RNG required to actually see that final boss is totally overboard, if not so absurd that I respect it. The problem is that most players will never see that final boss without following a stringent guide, which I understand is a Destiny tradition, but double sucks with the added wrinkle of "you can get ganked by randos at any time."

And another thing: the Control room tanks my framerate. That's not good, considering it's the premiere PvP spot on the map. Please fix, Bungie.

Marathon is setting a high bar for interactive maps that have their own "thing" going on. We've come a long way from Blood Gulch's teleporters, Terminal's train, and that funky conveyer belt in the center of Halo 2's Colossus. Dire Marsh has its lockdowns, anomalies, and fog. Outpost has its Pinwheel heist and heat cascade hazard. Perimeter is, well, it's the beginner map. And Cryo Archive is something else entirely: part raid, part investigation, part puzzle box.

Yesterday, Bungie revealed that both of Marathon's endgame activities, Ranked mode and the raid-like Cryo Archive, would be limited to the weekend. More specifically, Cryo Archive runs from Friday to Monday, while Ranked runs from Saturday to Tuesday each week. This tight schedule, plus overlap between the two modes, has already proven to be divisive.

In response, Marathon's game director Joe Ziegler released a lengthy post to expand on Bungie's reasoning. Ziegler opens by acknowledging the feedback so far and noting that the team is "always iterating and [is] open to looking at other options in the future". Right off the bat, it doesn't sound like a hill Bungie wants to die on, though Ziegler took the opportunity to explain why this weekly schedule was implemented. And you know what? I think the plan makes sense (with a few tweaks), even if it's somewhat awkward.

As Ziegler explains it, the weekend-heavy endgame schedule is structured around three core principles.

• Preparing: "Players will lose a lot of gear on Cryo and Ranked because it is intended to challenge you to your limits," so the downtime during the week is meant for you to re-gear.
• Economy: "We have some great rewards on Cryo that kind of break the bank when it comes to economy and power gain." In other words, if players were able to get all this top-tier loot whenever, there would be too much of it in-game at any given time. In fact, Ziegler notes that they'd likely have to adjust the drop rate of the endgame rewards as a result.
• Logistics: Because of the high level and entry requirements, it "inherently makes the amount of people in that queue at any time unpredictable." By making both Ranked and Cryo Archive a weekend-only ordeal, "more players will show up".

Bungie's reasoning is clear: the weekend schedule is intended to counter power creep, give players time to prepare so it's not just the hardcore players that can take part, and help queue times. When you think about it this way, yes, this structure is actually pretty smart. Instead of nerfing how rewarding the endgame is, Bungie's turned it into a loop of gearing up, getting OP, inevitably losing it, and doing it all over again. The minimum gear value requirements for both modes, being relatively high as they are now, are guardrails.

However, as Ziegler points out, "there are likely some who cannot participate" in either activity simply because they both take place over the weekend, give or take a day or two. If you can't make these days, then you can't play the endgame. That's a major pain point (for myself included), and I'm struggling to see a clear solution to this, other than perhaps making ranked mode last a few days longer so the overlap isn't quite so severe. If either mode were made permanently available, it would break the loop.

Nevertheless, Ziegler confirms the team is paying close attention to the feedback, citing three main focuses that could be tweaked: staggering the two events more to reduce overlap, "changing" (reducing, surely) the minimum gear requirements, and tweaking other aspects like solos.

"We'll be looking into what we can do to retain these considerations and potentially accommodate this in the future."

After weeks of teasers, Marathon's fourth map is right around the corner. No, like, for real this time: the Cryo Archive map option has appeared in Marathon with a countdown ending tomorrow, March 20. That's the same time that its complicated ranked mode arrives.

To commemorate the dogged community solving the Cryo Archive ARG, Bungie unlocked a launch trailer that gives us the closest look at the endgame map yet. What I'm reacting to immediately: extremely close-quarters, a density of UESC bots, and the realization that the only alien in this map might be the S'pht Compiler hiding on the ship.

That would be a little disappointing, because I was half expecting Cryo Archive to introduce a full-on secondary faction of S'pht aliens pulled from the original Marathon games. But aside from that, Bungie's own description of Cryo Archive in a blog post published today confirms the map will be dense with puzzles:

• Intensity: Cranked to the top. Cryo Archive is a pinnacle challenge and will take many runs to learn and master.
• Playstyle: Think raid-style puzzle solving and layered mechanics wrapped around brutal extraction stakes.
• Design: A labyrinthian layout where tight corridors give way to massive open spaces, pitting enemy crews against each other to unseal frozen Vaults.

The blog goes on to explain how this map will make the other three look like a walk in the park. Apparently there's a whopping seven vaults packing "some of the most lucrative loot in the game, some of which you can't find anywhere else."

To no surprise for seasoned Destiny players (but sort of a surprise to me), Bungie also says Cryo Archive will operate like its ranked Trials of Osiris mode in Destiny 2: it'll only be available on the weekends. That might prove controversial for basic accessibility reasons, but the timing around the weekend limitation also makes this whole puzzle business look more arbitrary—this puzzle seems to be wrapping up close to the date that Bungie was probably aiming for no matter what.

I imagine it took Bungie a lot of time and iteration before settling on Marathon's competitive system. After all, how do you structure a Ranked mode in an extraction shooter, a genre where winning and losing isn't clear-cut? How does starting gear factor in? Does killing players or AI give you rank points? What is even the goal? Kill people or loot as much as possible?

There were a lot of ideas floating around in my head ever since Bungie announced Marathon would have a Ranked mode, and the developer has now clarified how the system works. Understandably, it's very complicated to make a competitive mode in an extraction shooter. To help you understand it better, Bungie's made… a maths test.

This 'ranked calculation worksheet' puts your understanding of the scoring system to the test with four questions (plus a bonus), which you answer using the data in the given table. So let's try to answer them to see if I actually learned anything after reading through Bungie's official explainer multiple times over.

1: Johnnie equips a Silver Holotag. Andy equips a Gold Holotag. Chris equips a Silver Holotag. What is their crew's score target?

• This is a simple matter of adding up the score target of each tier of tag, since the value you need to earn during a match is a combination of your crew's tags. So, Gold is 7,000, and Silver is 5,000 each. The answer should be 17,000 score target.

2: Paul equips a Gold Holotag. Ross equips a Silver Holotag. Nikki equips a Platinum Holotag. How many Ranked Points will they each lose on failure to exit?

• If you fail to extract from a match, you'll lose rank based on the combined value of your crew's Holotags, so you basically just need to add the values up again. Gold is worth 4,200, Silver is worth 2,000, and Platinum is worth 8,000. In total, each player should lose 14,200 Ranked Points in this scenario.

3: Brian equips a Diamond Holotag. Eric equips a Platinum Holotag. Nick equips a Platinum Holotag. They loot three Gold Holotags. How many Ranked Points can they potentially gain?

• This requires working out to different values, your team's score target and your 'overperformance capacity', which is basically just bonus points from looting other players' tags or completing events. You then add these values together to work out how many Ranked Points are up for grabs. The combined score target of this crew should be 55,000, while the overperformance capacity is 13,250. Add them together, and you get a total of 68,250.

4: Phil equips a Gold Holotag and exfils after looting 6,000 gear value. How many Ranked Points does he gain?

• This is a trick question. You'll only gain Ranked Points if you reach your score target and exfil in one piece. For a Gold Holotag, you need to loot 7,000 in gear value, so sorry Phil, but you don't gain or lose any rank for this match.

Bonus: Eunice equips a Platinum Holotag. How much additional gear value does she need to be eligible to queue for High Stakes? (10,000 gear value requirement.)

• To queue for a High Stakes match, you need to have a starting loadout value of at least 10,000. If I'm understanding this confusing question correctly, then you need to subtract the cost of the Platinum Holotag from the gear value threshold, so 10,000 minus 1,500. In other words, Eunice would need to equip 8,500 worth of gear to actually queue.

While Bungie's done this math test in jest, I must say, it's rather helpful in getting your head around the complex system. Holotag costs, score targets, overperformance, it's all very complicated. However, after studying the learning material (Bungie's blog explaining Ranked), I think this competitive mode could be a real game-changer. You know other players will have at least a certain level of gear worth taking, so you won't be wasting energy and risking resources on free loadout rats.

It's Marathon's risk and reward taken to its logical conclusion, encouraging you to complete map events and take on other players in PvP. In other words, to experience Marathon at its best.