Marathon's Cryo Archive is locked to weekends partly because you're going to "lose a lot of gear" and you need time to grind during the week, director says

The Marathon Cryo Archive release time is now, at least for the time being. The endgame activity, alongside ranked mode, only opens to players on the weekends, a move that's garnered some criticism from those whose lives don't fit Bungie's schedule. Marathon game director Joe Ziegler is open to some changes, but says there are three key motivations behind keeping the mode time-gated.

"We acknowledge that players will lose a lot of gear on Cryo and Ranked because it is intended to challenge you to your limits," Ziegler says in a lengthy tweet (via Rock Paper Shotgun). "As a result of that, it's important that Cryo and Ranked feel like an event you can schedule towards, grind gear up to do, etc. The loop of spend time grinding gear to spend it in Cryo or Ranked is reflected in this choice as a weekly cycle."

Conversely, if you're good at Cryo Archive, you're going to get a lot of great gear in return. If the mode were open all week, Ziegler argues, "we'd probably have to adjust how frequently you can earn these rewards so that we don't flood the game with amazing loot all of a sudden."

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The third concern Ziegler cites is "logistics time." Both Cryo Archive and Ranked are "built around the idea of you matching with other players on an equal investment level," and since the queues will necessarily only be filled with a pool of high-end players, that "inherently makes the amount of people in that queue at any time unpredictable." Limiting the time these modes are available funnels those players in at one time, keeping matches easy to find and full of challenge.

Those reasons all make sense, but they're small comfort to those who have other obligations on the weekend - or those who simply prefer to invest their gaming hours at other times. For both these folks and the "no-life" crew, Ziegler says the team is "looking into what we can do to retain these considerations and potentially accommodate this in the future."

Ziegler highlights four specific things that Bungie "may iterate on in the future:"

• Staggering Ranked and Cryo queues more so they overlap less
• Looking at changing the days we do either Cryo or Ranked
• Changing the ante values of Cryo or Ranked
• Looking at any other conditions (solo experience, crew fill experience, etc.) and iterating on it!

For now, players are simply going to have to log in this weekend to find out how all this theory works in practice.

Check out our guide to all the Marathon factions.