Marathon Devs Test Duos Mode “At Wider Scale” With Potential Global Launch on the Cards

There has been a lot of discussion about Marathon’s gameplay, pacing, and potential shortcomings in the weeks since the game launched. One feature that has seemingly been requested all over since the game launched is a duos queue for squads of two players, and it looks as though Bungie is indulging in the fans’ requests with an imminent experimental duos queue. According to an X post by Marathon’s game director, Bungie will start testing for a duos queue on Wednesday, 18 March, at 10 AM PT. Given that Bungie is even testing a duos queue suggests that there is enough player feedback for the game studio to consider adding the feature to the game at large. There are still questions about how two-player teams will fare in a game that has notoriously high time-to-kill in non-PvP encounters, but that’s perhaps one of the gameplay aspects that will need tuning and experimentation to nail down.

This is an experimental test that will be limited to the Perimeter zone, and there are a few minor details to note if you’re planning to hop into the new game mode. For starters, and likely the most notable issue players might run into, the duos queue will not have any matchmaking, meaning duos will only be available to players already in a squad with two players. The director is also clear that “some things will be jank,” suggesting this will be far from a polished experience for players, but he hopes that any data gathered during the testing can be used to expand the duos queue in the future. Players interested in joining the duos queue can select “Perimeter – Duos” from the zone selection screen, but this will not be the final UX flow, leaving Bungie with a lot of headroom to grow the Marathon duos gameplay experience going forward.

Alright everyone we’re going a bit rogue here. 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. Important things to note:

• It will be on Perimeter only for now.
• The test will last about 2 weeks (but we might cut it off early or elongate it depending on what’s going on).
• You can only enter duos with a premade group of you and another friend. (no matchmaking solo into duos).
• You will be matched with other duos only.
• You can select “Perimeter – Duo” from the zone select screen to access it. (not the final intended ux flow right now)
• Some things will be a bit jank.

Just a note: this is a bit of an experimental feature so we expect to learn some things along the way and make changes to future versions of this. This likely won’t be the final implementation of how it would look and flow in the game, but for now it was easiest way for us to get it to you all to help us test.

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.

Additionally, this is unlikely to be the last experiment we run, so look forward to more as we continue to evolve Marathon. FOR SCIENCE!