Marathon Players Smuggled Powerful Loot From The Beta Into Game

On March 5, after an extended development cycle and delay, Bungie’s sci-fi extraction shooter Marathon launched on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. There are some questionable microtransactions in the game’s store and some players on PC are reporting performance issues, but for the most part, the launch has been fairly stable. I was able to get in and play a few runs without issue. But when some players booted up Marathon on Thursday, they discovered loot they had shared with teammates back in the beta was waiting for them in their in-game inbox.

In Marathon, if you drop a piece of gear for a teammate and you all extract successfully, you get that gear back. This is intended to make it hard to trade gear with other players permanently, which could likely be used by some to sell rare loot. It also encourages players to share guns with squadmates to ensure everyone gets out alive. But this feature is accidentally leading to people getting good gear that they probably shouldn’t be getting.

As documented on Reddit and Twitter, some players who lent a gun, backpack, or other piece of gear to another player during the open beta are getting those items back on day one of Marathon’s launch. This includes some players allegedly finding powerful and rare weapons and super-useful backpacks just waiting for them to grab and use.

As some players pointed out, if people had known about this before the Server Slam ended, we’d have likely seen a huge amount of folks sharing gear before extracting to try to game the system. This all seems unintended, as Bungie made it clear that beta gear and progress would not be carried over to the main game.

Kotaku has contacted Bungie about the situation and will update if we hear back.

The question I have now is if this is going to be how it works moving forward when Bungie wipes the servers every few months at the start of a new season. Will people be able to smuggle in powerful SMGs and rifles by giving them to a buddy before exfilling at the end of a season? I hope not, as I think that would really screw with the meta refresh plans Bungie has for Marathon’s seasons.