A PvP-focused extraction shooter set on the mysterious planet of Tau Ceti IV, Marathon will see players inhabit the bodies of Runners, cybernetic mercenaries who have been designed to survive the planet’s harsh environments, exploring the lost colony that once inhabited Tau Ceti’s surface. Players will engage solo or in crews of three, searching for mysterious alien artifacts, as well as for valuable loot and new weapons and gear that they can add to their collection.

A massive ghost ship hangs in low orbit over a lost colony. The 30,000 souls who called this world home have disappeared without a trace. Strange signals hint at rumors of mysterious artifacts, long-dormant AI, and troves of untold riches. You are a cybernetic mercenary – a Runner – and your destination is Tau Ceti IV. You are one of many, working solo or with a crew, venturing into the unknown and facing the unimaginable in a fight for survival, for riches, for fame... and for infamy. Who among you will write their names across the stars? 

In Marathon, players inhabit a Runner, a cybernetic mercenary scouring the remains of a lost colony of Tau Ceti IV for fortune and power. Players team up in crews of three as they battle rival Runner teams and hostile security forces for weapons and upgrades. Survive and everything they’ve scavenged is theirs to keep for future runs on Tau Ceti IV—or if they’re brave enough, a journey to the derelict Marathon ship that hangs above.

Welcome to Tau Ceti IV, a lost colony whose inhabitants disappeared without a trace. Rival factions compete for the resources left behind, hiring Runners who’ve given up their human form for biosynthetic shells. Death is but a hurdle in this cutthroat competition where power, fortune, and answers to Tau Ceti IV’s mysteries hang in the balance.

Choose from a roster of cybernetic mercenaries with unique abilities. Players customize their Runner’s playstyle with the weapons, implants, and equipment they collect on their runs. Strategize, execute, and become Tau Ceti’s most feared mercenary.

Season 2 Begins June 2 - Everything you need to know about the end of Season 1 and seasonal resets

Runners continue to pillage what isn’t theirs across Tau Ceti, and the UESC is growing tired of their criminal activities. As Season 1 comes to a close, you’ll see the first of the UESC’s renewed security efforts, with more to come when Season 2: NIGHTFALL begins on June 2. More details about Season 2 will drop as we get closer to June 2.

In the meantime, we have a couple of end-of-season updates to preview. We also want to share more details about the seasonal reset, including what you keep, what goes, and loot rewards you’ll receive when NIGHTFALL begins on June 2.  

End of Season Update

As the season comes to an end, we want to embrace the feeling of liberated chaos that comes from knowing a fresh start for everyone is just around the corner. To that, our goal with update 1.0.9 coming next Tuesday is to amp up some of the rewards you can earn to make your runs more lucrative and exciting.

Guaranteed Map Events and Key

Locked room keys are guaranteed to drop from Wardens for the remainder of the season. 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.

Escalation in UESC Forces

Expect increases in UESC presence across Tau Ceti IV in response to Runner activity.

• New Warden Encounters: Wardens can spawn at new POIs in Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost.
• UESC dropship flyovers and crash sites: UESC aerial activity has increased dramatically on Perimeter. Use this as an opportunity to seize their supplies.
• Stay vigilant: The UESC will be deploying a new threat on Dire Marsh to help shutdown Runner activity.

Cryo Archive Increased Availability

We want more players to have their shot at Cryo Archive before the season closes, so the map will be available every day starting on May 21 through the end of the season on June 2. Those of you worried about losing it all at the “lose everything factory,” don’t worry: We’ll be sending you a free Cryo Archive Sponsored Kit to your mailbox every day during this time.

Players looking for the ultimate challenge will be able to test their mettle at Cryo Archive: Ranked. This special version of Cryo will serve as the grand closure of the Ranked queue for Season 1 and will be available from May 24 at 10AM PT to May 28 at 10AM PT. Note that regular Cryo will not be available at the same time as Ranked Cryo.

Here are the Ranked Cryo requirements:

• Runner Level 25
• 3,000 loadout requirements (low stakes)
• 10,000 loadout requirements (high stakes)

Faction Progression

Through the end of the season, we’re also increasing Faction experience gains from all sources. Use your additional faction progress to reach the end-of-season goals you’ve got your sights on.

Update 1.0.9 Balance Changes

Finally, we have a preview of a few other changes coming with Update 1.0.9.

Rook Update

One of the big perks of doing runs with Rook is being able to sneak around the UESC, and we have a buff to Signal Mask to make it easier to avoid detection.

• Signal Mask remains active for longer when sprinting.
• The range at which AI will detect your footsteps when Signal Mask is active has been reduced.

Key Template Changes

The feedback around Key Templates has been loud and clear: They have not been fun to engage with. Getting downed and losing your key has created an incentive to play extra passive and hide somewhere on the map until you can exfil as quickly as possible.  

For the rest of Season 1, Templates will be changed to be Compromised rather than Fragile. We think hunting for Matter Fixatives that drop from Commanders and other enemies will be a more interesting way to charge your keys. This will also prevent the keys from being destroyed during the match and allow for you to possibly loot these keys off other crews you best.   

New Way to Find Keys

We’ll also be creating new places for Deluxe keys to drop so there's now another chance for valuable loot on every map. After Update 1.0.9 there will be a chance for Deluxe keys to drop from every wall safe you loot.  

Prepare for the Reset

When Season 2 begins, Marathon will go through its first ever seasonal reset. The goal is for everyone to have a clean slate and equal footing at the start of the new season. It's a time where the community can explore what's new, discover what’s valuable, and chart a new path through the season together.

These resets include things related to gameplay progression; you’ll keep your achievements, non-seasonal Codex progression, and cosmetics. See below for the full breakdown.

Redeem Those Item Rewards!

All unclaimed gear and equipment reward packages from factions and the Codex will reset with the new season, so grab ‘em now and make use of the goods while you can.

Cosmetic items, including styles, titles, and emblems, will autocomplete at the end of the season and automatically be available for use in Season 2. So don’t sweat it if you miss claiming some cosmetics—if you’ve earned it, you’ll have it in Season 2.

Also reminder that Rewards Passes do not reset and your progress carries over to the start of the new season.

Ranked Rewards for Season 1

The end of Season 1 will also mark the end of your current climb on the Ranked queue. Your current rank will be reset at the start of Season 2, and you will get the chance to climb the ladder again and earn new cosmetic and other rewards.

Once Ranked ends, you’ll be able to claim the emblems, titles, and styles you earned based on the highest rank you achieved this season. Rewards can be claimed in the Codex.

Bronze I	Silver I	Gold III	Gold I	Platinum I	Diamond I	Pinnacle I
Bronze Runner [Emblem]	Silver Runner [Emblem]	Glacial Impact [Destroyer Style]	Gold Runner [Emblem]	Platinum Runner [Emblem]	Diamond Runner [Emblem]	Pinnacle Runner [Emblem]
	Silver Runner [Background]		Gilded Survivor [Title]	Toolkit [Stryder M1T Weapon Style]	Glacial Strafe [Bully SMG Weapon Style]	Expanse [Repeater HPR Weapon Style]
						Ascendant Survivor [Title]

Two things worth noting:

1. You will only receive the Emblem of the highest rank you reach. So if you get to Diamond I, you’ll only receive the Diamond Runner Emblem (not the Bronze Emblem, Silver Emblem, etc.). All other rewards are additive.

2. Ranked titles are available for use for one additional season after the one you earn it in. So if you earned “Gilded Survivor” title in Season 1, you can still show it off in Season 2 but need to climb back up to Gold I again for it to carry over to Season 3. All other rewards are permanent.

Check This List Before the Reset

Have questions about what is staying and what is going? Here's a comprehensive list.

Affected by the Season Reset

• Runner Level
• Ranked Level
• Faction Level and Upgrades
• Credits and other currencies 
  • Exceptions: LUX and SILK
• All items in your inventory and Vault
• Purchases unlocked by Schemas
• Messages, rewards, and returned items in your Mailbox
• Priority Contracts 
  • Exception: first contract for each Faction
• Gear-granting seasonal Codex entries for: 
  • Runner Level
  • Ranked

Not Affected by the Season Reset

• Cosmetics and weapon unlocked and redeemed during Season 1
• Codex challenges, including partial progress (except Runner and Ranked levels) 
  • Combat
  • Feats
  • Loot
  • Map
  • Runner
  • Title
• Faction Unlocks 
  • Access to each faction you had previously unlocked is retained; no need to repeat Liaison Contracts
• Initial Priority Contracts 
  • Completion status of the first contract for each faction is retained
• LUX and SILK balances
• Rewards Pass progress

Secure Sponsored Kits for Season 2

When Season 2 begins, CyberAcme will be doling out Sponsored Kits for your hard work this season. You’ll be able to claim your Sponsored Kits in the Codex based on your final Runner Level this season:

• Runner Level 10: Enhanced CyberAcme Sponsored Kit
• Runner Level 25: Enhanced CyberAcme Sponsored Kit
• Runner Level 50: Deluxe CyberAcme Sponsored Kit
• Runner Level 75: Superior CyberAcme Sponsored Kit

These rewards are additive, so if you get to Level 75, you’ll be able to claim all four Sponsored Kits. ONI thanks you for your efforts.

NIGHTFALL is Coming

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.

Launch, Learnings, and What’s Next

THE SHORT VERSION (TL;DR)

There’s a lot of words ahead, but here’s the gist of it:  

• With the first season of Marathon we’ve created a strong core community.  
• We're embarking on a multi-season journey built around growing from the seed of this strong community.
• We’re looking to solve some pain points for players:
  • Making the game less grindy, more rewarding
  • Making improvements to things like the UI/UX, matchmaking, end game meta, playing as solos/duos, etc.
  • Smoothing out onboarding
• We’re also going to build out more of the core game:
  • Adding new fun and mind-bending content: new and updated zones, Runner shells, new combatants, weapons, loot, and more
  • Building systems to make progressing more interesting
• We want to build more survival experiences for different moods, like if you want to full sweat or lean back and chill.
  • Exploring more pure PVP, PVE, and PVP-lite experiences
  • Continue experimenting with experimental queues to learn more around these experiences

Other highlights:

• We're bringing back Duos for Season 2 with a rotating Duos queue.
• We're testing some experiments in Season 2 around PVE and PVP-Lite modes.
• We’re expanding the max size of your Vault and increasing faction progression rates in Season 2.
• We’ll talk more about Season 2 content like Night Marsh, the new Cradle progression system, and the Runner shell Sentinel, the week of May 25.  

If this summary has your interest piqued, read on below for more info on these topics.

THREE MONTHS LATER

If this were a recording, this is where you'd hear me press play, the synth beats with the lulling hum of a playful but elusive baseline would collide with your eardrums and my voice would greet you with a warm and simple "Hello." So let's just imagine that's happening and get started...

Nearly three months have passed since we've flung you across the stars and crash landed you onto the dangerous and mysterious lost colony on Tau Ceti IV. For the development team, myself, and all of the talented teams at Bungie and Sony that have been supporting us, it has been quite a wild ride.

From launch to now, we've watched you tackle the challenges of Tau Ceti, learn to navigate its threats, discover new ways to engage with one another, and create infinite unique stories of survival. And through it all, we've been watching, listening, and trying new things in an effort to learn more about you all.

As we come closer to the end of our first season and the subsequent start of Season 2, we wanted to take some time to reflect on the learnings of Season 1 and how that informs our thoughts about what we want to achieve as we build future seasons.

So please come take a walk with us as we reflect a bit on Marathon.

BEFORE

Marathon’s roots go back to the original trilogy of the 90s, where you, as a lone security officer, defend a colony ship above the distant planet Tau Ceti IV. Your fight for survival begins a long journey of discovery in which you learn about ancient alien races, the dangers of AI evolution and "rampancy," and the complex nature of dimensional reality, among many other themes.

As we moved towards bringing those ideas to life, we brought together a team to make a social survival experience, one built around a few core concepts and themes:

1. Everything is potentially dangerous: Create an environment where everything is a hazard or threat. This includes fauna and flora indigenous to the planet, weather patterns, NPC enemies, and other players.
2. Preparing is important: Feel high value in bringing and utilizing the right resources for the problems you encounter.
3. Every run moves you forward: Ensure every run feels like it's pushing you forward, raising the floor on your possibilities.
4. Bigger risk, bigger reward: Create an environment where you can take on more risk of death to gain better rewards.
5. Use your judgment: Focus on open-ended decisions. Let players tackle challenges in open-ended ways. Fight, flee, and evade based on your judgment of the scenario. Create loose alliances, compete to gain resources for your own betterment, or wait out the battles and scavenge the field.
6. Surviving matters: Prompt players to consider survival as the core win condition and ensure that living feels successful.

Building on these concepts, we constructed the game around high-impact decisions, feeling the push and pull of making a game that felt too complex, confusing, and punishing versus one that felt learnable and punishing enough to keep survival as its central theme. We iterated with expanding groups of players, making shifts in our core gameplay and features as we got feedback through our tests.

In the end, we landed on a game where we felt we had achieved a balance in which we were provoking players to learn, take risks, feel the glory of successfully surviving, and the tragedy of catastrophic failure, all in the pursuit of creating compelling stories of traversing the mysterious and dangerous environment on an alien planet.

And then we put that game in a cannon and launched it out into the world beyond us...

WHAT WENT WELL

Out of the gate, it was exciting to see the core community build around the tense survival experience we created. The sheer number of stories the community has shared of their moments running across the planet, battling the UESC, getting into heated fights with other Runners, and yes, sometimes dying to the errant tick nest or poison plant, were overwhelmingly inspiring.

The love we've seen for the world we've created has been unimaginably exciting as well. Fanart, lore videos, video edits, and music shares have become a common staple of our internal chats. For all this and more, we are highly thankful for the community that has come to join us for this first season. You are the reason we do this, and our gratitude for all of you cannot be expressed enough.

Throughout Season 1, we've also been building a lot of muscle to deliver a more responsive and iterative live game to match the pace at which players have been playing.

• We launched Cryo Archive, our first endgame map, and Ranked Mode.
• We launched our experimental queue, including experiments around Duos and Sponsored Kit queues.
• We've tackled a variety of balance patches and hotfixes as we've seen problems in the live game.
• We launched the mid-season C.A.R.R.I. initiative focused on playing with and against others in new ways.

With each release, we've been learning and getting better at understanding the needs of our live game operations and upgrading where we've seen opportunities. But as many of you know, Season 1 has not been without some hiccups and challenges, so let's discuss these a bit.

WHAT WE'VE LEARNED

Where do we start? Developing a new game is always a challenge, and creating a live game in 2026 is no simple effort. There are millions of moving parts to a game, especially a player-driven and systems-dense game such as Marathon. Let's start at a high level with some themes we've observed around the Marathon game and community.

• Marathon is overwhelming to learn.
  • Marathon for new players can be an overwhelming experience. After a short tutorial, you're often thrown into the fire to learn a lot of concepts, navigate a lot of screens, filter through a ton of loot, and build muscle memory with a lot of mechanics fairly quickly in a hostile environment where other players can bring you down and take your stuff.
• It's easy to hit a wall if you're not spending lots of time, don't have a consistent crew, or are not super skilled.
  • Matches can feel like a death spiral for some players. You kit up, you go in, you die to a spawn rush, or someone gets the jump on you as you're looting. Faction progress can feel like a slog, and you struggle to get mats and credits out to upgrade. You rarely get out of that loop, and the endgame of Cryo can feel so far away as you inch your way forward in the precious hours you have to play every week. And doing it solo just makes it all harder...
• Still figuring out the balance mix of the endgame.
  • Bubbles, ‘nade spam, and snipers can make it feel like every engagement at the endgame, with all the stuff everyone has accumulated, is chaotic, fast, and stressful in a bad way. Taking time to make important tactical decisions can feel like a luxury. Spawn rushing and lobby clearing are dominant strategies that pull the pacing too far and make matches too predictable. Matchmaking can be a blessing or a curse.
• Sometimes you don't want to sweat.
  • Gripping your precious loot every moment as you creep your way to the exfil while spinning your head around like a chicken to make sure another Runner doesn't drop on top of you with a shotgun is a fun and intense experience. But after a few runs of that, sometimes you need to power down and just want to frag out or relax and play a different way. It's hard to find that chill moment in Marathon.

As we’ve been learning these lessons, we’ve also been experimenting and observing some additional areas to help us explore avenues to improve Marathon:

1. Sponsored Marsh / Perimeter are helpful to create a more chill environment to play, especially if you've just been stomped or want to focus on getting some quests done over duking it out for loot. A lot of people have been playing the Sponsored Kit queues, and we're excited to see how it helps the overall loop of economic gain and progression.
2. Sponsored Kits can be a good way to up the floor over the season and help recovery. Escalating from lower-end kits to middle-end kits over the season can make it easier to get back into the fight, especially for players who play less.
3. Our matchmaking systems need different dimensions. In Season 1, they were focused on making sure players with less experience and knowledge were being kept away from those with more. This resulted in some good, which is newer players being protected for longer, and some bad, which is some unfortunate small pooling happening in the later parts of the season. The result was a constant battle we fought between match quality and queue times.
4. We need to be careful with how many queues we're running. Throughout the season we added more queues which inevitably split the population more and led to some increased queue times. As we go into future seasons, we want to be more judicious with how we handle the amount of queues better.

We've been absorbing so much over this season thanks to feedback, research, and play data from you all. It makes our heads spin sometimes. We're dizzy with it. But learning is just the first step to improvement, so let's discuss what we're planning next.

WHERE WE WANT TO GO

When we were bringing Marathon out for players, our aspiration started with a simple statement: We want players to experience the thrill and danger of surviving on the edge of the explored universe. Our plan is to commit to that mission by both going deeper and expanding on that definition.

To that end we have two main paths we're walking down starting with Season 2:

A BETTER SEAT-GRIPPING EXPERIENCE WITH MORE MIND BENDING SCI-FI:

First and foremost, we want to continue to evolve the challenging and tense experience that our players have come to love while leaning further into the wild world we've created.

We want to build on it with new content and systems that challenge you in new ways to grow, collaborate, and compete with one another in your quest to thrive in Tau Ceti’s deadly environments. New zones, zone changes and variants, new shells, new weapons, new equipment, and loot galore. New systems that change how you progress in a season. New contracts that add to the journey of exploration and gaining favor with the factions. And changes to parts of the game that meaningfully help you reexamine what you already know.

In Season 2 we'll be starting that journey with some things we'll be adding to the mix, including a new dimension of challenge with Night Marsh, a new defensive Runner shell Sentinel, new weapons and equipment, a revamp to how you acquire Runner shell stats to give you more options with the Cradle, and increased progression rates for faction and Runner levels.

Beyond Season 2, we're working on some interesting ideas that will help to escalate the game and bring new areas of Tau Ceti to life. As we develop this new content, we’re focusing on how we bring new and interesting challenges to the game for both veterans and newcomers alike. Just a note, these ideas are in development, and so in the interest of transparency, we're going to enumerate them below but they'll likely take better shape and change as we learn more over Season 2.

• A new zone that leans into more alien elements and mind warping debuffs.
• New enemies from Tau Ceti and beyond, big and small alike.
• New weapons that fill out the battery side of the arsenal.
• New ways to exfil that create interesting tradeoffs between how much loot you carry versus how safe they are.

We’re also dedicating a strong effort to smoothing out the experience and solving issues we already see, as well as any new issues that arise, in a quick and responsive manner. This includes not only balance changes and improvements to the user experience, but also ensuring you can find good value in playing a little as well as playing a lot, and that you can better find the right challenges for your gear and skill level as you grow in the game.

• In Season 2, we’ll be adding a Duos rotating zone queue.
• In Season 2, we’ll be adding a new matchmaking system that helps players find better quality matches with more flex for higher-end players.
• In Season 2, we’ll be expanding the max size of your Vault.
• For Season 2 and beyond, we're working on a set of UX improvements to help make setting goals and getting into a match smoother.
• For Season 3 and beyond, we’re working on improving our onboarding experience to make it less overwhelming for new players.
• For Season 3 and beyond, we’ll be making changes to the contract system to improve how you interact with Priority and other contracts.

MORE OPTIONS TO CHILL AND NEW SURVIVAL EXPERIENCES:

The second theme is about how 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. This means new ways to play that accommodate different friend groups, moods, and time availability to allow you to experience the thrilling survival of Tau Ceti in the way that fits your needs.

• 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.
• 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.

Big things coming down the line! So with all this talk about the future, let's wrap this up with one last reflection on this year-long journey we're going to take together.

NOW AND AFTER

If this were a recording, this is where I'd pause the music and bring my hands together and stare thoughtfully off in the distance. I'd begin to say something, and then probably stop myself and take a few deep breaths before continuing.

Today we're approaching the end of Season 1, but our eyes are on the road from here to beyond 2026 and into 2027 and our hands are working to pave that road as we speak. The journey ahead is one that will see the game expand in scope, depth, and breadth of what it has been for Season 1, all in the interest of bringing to life the vibrancy and passion that we have as a team for sharing our love of survival challenges with you all.

To look more directly at our plans and goals for the next year:

• Season 2 is on the horizon and we'll be sowing the seeds for a lot of our future plans via new content such as Sentinel and Night Marsh, systems, and experiments around new play modes that may become permanent in the future.
• Season 3 we're planning to introduce a lot (and I mean a lot) of revisions to our early experience, including big updates to Perimeter, alongside a new Runner shell, and additional (no spoilers) content.
• Season 4 we're focusing on building more depth into the existing extraction loop.
• Season 5 we're looking at bringing the whole ecosystem of (PV(P)VE) play together and evolving our weird sci-fi world in new ways.

For those of you who have joined us on this journey, we want to thank you. Your feedback, your endless support, and your passion have become the echoing chant that fuels us to conjure new ideas, create new solutions to problems, and have fun doing it. We're excited for you to join us as we grow this game around you and the community you've created.

For those of you who may be on the fence about whether or not we're the right game for you: thank you as well. We're excited to welcome you when you're ready to take the dive so keep checking back in with us as we walk this journey and if you get the itch, we'll be more than happy to have you.

Alright, this is where I hit the stop button. I've written a lot of words. Time to get back to work and turn words into releases.

Thank you infinitely,

--Joe.

Marathon is designed from the start as a PvP-focused game and won’t have a single-player campaign, instead, with the PvP experience as the foundation, Marathon creates opportunities for player-driven stories to unfold, stories that are integrated with the overarching game narrative in a world full of persistent, evolving zones, where players create their own journey with every run they take. That might mean an unforgettable firefight against another crew vying for the same loot, or a last-second extraction while beset on all sides.

Compete for survival, riches, and renown in a world of evolving, persistent zones, where any run can lead to greatness.

Marathon's gunplay sets the stage for a unique mix of tactical and fast-paced action, where every run is a tense competition for a big score. End game challenges, ranked play, seasonal storytelling, community events, and more await in Season 1.

Marathon is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam) on March 5, 2026 at $39.99/€39.99/£34.99 with full cross-save and cross-play.