Something's afoot in Marathon, as Bungie's new FPS is leading players toward the trickiest map to date. A mysterious new area has been added to the menu, indicating the ongoing ARG will soon be ending, letting people into the Cryo Archive.
Made up of seven disparate puzzles, diehard Marathon-ers have been gradually solving each layer to unlock the next, with the seventh leading us to this fourth map. In classic Bungie fashion, these have been relatively esoteric challenges to work out, and actually getting properly started required a hint from the devs.
But now, there's real momentum, leading to six of the seven stages being done. You can't select Cryo Archive just yet, but per a Reddit post, a message when you try reveals the Marathon Cryo Archive requirements to play it when it is available: work with all six Marathon factions, and get to at least level 25.
Pretty straightforward, and a solid way to encourage people to poke around the lore a little bit and spend some proper time in the futuristic extraction shooter. If you're someone who has a few levels to go, making time for each of the six factions - Cyberacme, Nucaloric, Traxus, Mida, Arachne, and Sekiguchi - will get you much closer, if not over the line.
Having such a barrier for entry guarantees those who're putting the hours into their playtime get to first experience this particular playground of violence, and all the horrors and precious loot it has to offer. There'll be less trolling too, though you can never get rid of that entirely.
"This will prevent all the YouTuber influencer hate trolls from playing it," one commenter on Reddit states. "I wonder if each season you’ll need to climb back to level 25? I kinda hope you do to give you a purpose in climbing through the factions again outside of just faction upgrades," another Redditor muses.
Information we have on Cryo Archive is scant, other than that it's on an abandoned ship, and we still have to wait for the playerbase to figure the last part of this ARG. You can find a number of visuals on the official website and some neat videos on the official YouTube channel. I suspect we're going to find out what's frozen in there soon enough, for better and worse.
