Marathon game director Joe Ziegler has announced an “experimental feature” that’s currently in development for Bungie’s latest shooter. That feature? A duos mode that will see players able to squad up with just one other player, rather than the game’s standard trios format.
Ziegler recently posted on X, explaining that he’d like players to test this new feature.
“Alright everyone, we’re going a bit rogue here,” Ziegler wrote. “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 10 AM PT, we’ll be enabling a limited time duos queue on Perimeter only to test how the game plays with crews of two at a wider scale.”
Ziegler added that players should note the following:
- The test will take place only on the game’s Perimeter map (for now).
- The test will “last about two weeks,” though Ziegler says that timeframe could be reduced or increased depending on how things play out.
- Players can only enter duos matches with a premade squad, as there is no ability to solo queue in duos mode.
- Duos squads will only be matched with other duos squads.
- Duos can be accessed by selecting “Perimeter: Duo” from the zone select screen, though this is “not the intended UX flow” for the mode and will likely change if it is implemented permanently.
- “Some things will be a bit jank.”
“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,” Ziegler said. “This likely won’t be the final implementation of how it would look and flow in the game, but for now it was [the] easiest way for us to get it to you all to help us test.”
Ziegler also added that the end goal for Bungie is expanding duos-based gameplay in Marathon.
“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,” he explained.
The former Valorant game director also revealed that Marathon players have many more experimental modes to look forward to.
“This is unlikely to be the last experiment we run, so look forward to more as we continue to evolve Marathon,” Ziegler wrote. “FOR SCIENCE!!
