Marathon is in its second week out in the wild and Bungie has released the game’s biggest patch yet. The update adds lots of fixes and tweaks, but the main addition is a new end-game map called Cryo Archive. It’s live in the game and presumably filled with valuable salvage but no one’s sure how to access it yet. “Good luck getting there,” reads the patch note from Bungie.
As the studio has done in the past with Destiny, Cryo Archive appears to require solving an ongoing ARG in order to unlock access to it. Marathon players have spent the last week going through puzzles and discovering some neat videos, but for most players this will be a matter of logging on one day and seeing that whatever the next phase of Marathon is as magically triggered.
And once Cryo Archive goes live, players will still be gated from playing it unless they are level 25 and have unlocked access to every Faction. That’s not super hard but it does take some time and will definitely prevent more casual players from seeing what Cryo Archive is all about first-hand. Leading up to that event, however, Bungie has already made some welcome changes to the base game.
That includes nerfing the WSTR Combat Shotgun that’s been wrecking folks inside of Marathon‘s more confined spaces and a fix for the bug that kept unequipping knife cosmetics. UESC dropships bringing in supplies will also no longer be clipping through the map or killing players when they arrive.
The two most significant tweaks are to the audio and mod swapping. Weapon mods can now be dragged and dropped on the inventory menu, making it way easier to manage your vault and change attachments. And enemy gunfire no longer travels so far. Bungie had recently over-tuned it so players were hearing gunfights from across the map. The radius for picking up on those sound effects how been lowered again.
Bungie has been quick to address other issues as well, buffing the amount of ammo drops on the map and juicing the frequency of player encounters so people don’t get bored. It’s even rushing ahead with an experimental new duos mode that the fanbase has been requesting. While some are worried it will split the matchmaking player base, it should be fun to test out whenever a squad’s third person decides to be a coward and bail early for the night.
The full Marathon 1.0.5 patch notes can be found here.
