Marathon developer Bungie will answer widespread demand with an "experimental" duos mode coming this Wednesday, March 18, making it significantly easier to play the game with a friend. It will be limited, but it will be a Marathon duos mode, and that's enough for me.
Game director Joe Ziegler broke the news on X/Twitter today. "We're going a bit rogue here," he writes. "We have a bit of an experimental feature that's in development we want to test and we'd love for you to help. As of Wednesday morning 3/18 at 10am PT, we'll be enabling a limited time duos queue on Perimeter only to test how the game plays with crews of 2 at a wider scale."
In other words, an official duos mode is still in the research and development stage, but Bungie has prepared a prototype that can be used for broader testing. The Perimeter-only duos mode will "last about 2 weeks," though Ziegler says "we might cut it off early or elongate it depending on what's going on."
You'll have to invite a friend beforehand as there won't be any matchmaking in this duos test – "you will be matched with other duos only" – and you'll have to select "Perimeter - Duo" from the list of zones to hop in. Speaking as someone who's found it roughly 11x harder to grab two friends than to get just one, even a mere harbinger of a full-fat Marathon duos mode is welcome news.
When I visited Bungie's Seattle studio to try a very different version of Marathon, I was told that the team's vision had always been 3v3. A solo mode wasn't planned or added until very late in development, and it was largely driven by player feedback to public tests. This is largely why the solo experience felt so unbalanced at launch. That, and Marathon is just very, very hard.
I see now that a pure 3v3 environment would've killed Marathon for me entirely; playing with random people is just that unappealing, and consistently grouping up with two friends is just that hard. The solo mode, and the unique 1v3 Rook class, have let me enjoy Marathon at all. Multiple times, a friend and I have played Arc Raiders instead of Marathon purely because of duos availability, so the more lobby options, the better.
"This likely won't be the final implementation of how it would look and flow in the game, but for now it was [the] easiest way for us to get it to you all to help us test," Ziegler adds. "We're excited to run this experiment with you all. Pending what we learn, we're hoping to expand duos as a queue in the future and we wanted to take this first step sooner than later so we could understand how it affects our game better before investing a lot more time in fleshing out the feature."
It'll be interesting to see what team comps emerge in duos. My guess? Triage and anybody else. I can see compelling arguments for Recon, Thief, and Assassin, but Triage feels like the true must-pick.
