Bungie’s traditional launch woes made for a terrible first impression of Marathon’s exciting second season and undermined its free-play week

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.