Bungie has shared more details on upcoming changes to Marathon after going quite for a bit following mass layoffs across the studio. A mid-season update arrives next week with a PVE “roguelite” verseion of Cryo Archive, the extraction shooter’s raid-like end-game map. But the developers are promising an even bigger PvE experiment will come to the game in the fall.
“Vault Breaker is our very first experimental PvE mode,” a new blog post reads. “We’re excited for you all to jump in and check it out, and we can’t wait to gather up all of your feedback and data as we continue to work towards our full PvE mode, arriving in Season 3.” It continues down near the bottom, “Vault Breaker, which runs from July 21st through August 4th, is our first foray into an experimental PvE mode, and our ears will be to the ground listening for your feedback that will help us continue to iterate as we continue to evolve PVE into Season 3.”
The tease suggests Bungie isn’t waiting to find out if Vault Breaker will be a successful mode, it needs PvE to work in Marathon lest the game get retired ahead of schedule. Vault Breaker is essentially a re-tooled version of Cryo Archive to remove PvP and keep the rewards players can earn from it from messing with the rest of the game’s multiplayer loot economy. The promise of a “full” PvE mode suggests Bungie is working on some more fundamentally re-crafted version of Marathon that won’t have human opponents.
The rest of the post is essentially a preview of the mid-season refresh players are getting after what’s honestly been a bummer couple of months. Vault Breaker will give players who didn’t complete Cryo Archive and its boss fight a chance to experience some peak level and encounter design moments. It’ll also come with a pretty convoluted progression path that I’m not going to even begin to bother with explaining here. The sandbox is also getting tuned, with buffs for the WSTR Combat Shotgun and nerfs for the D54 Battle Pistol.
The biggest chance is to grenades and bubble shields. Players can no load into matches with only two of one or one of each. The new cap on consumables is aimed at making high-level engagements less repetitive. “Feedback is clear that spam is still an issue on Cryo and that Bubble Shields are flattening high level combat,” writes the development team.
We’ll see if that brings more positive vibes to the back-half of season 2 than the first-half. Season 3 and its new PvE mode won’t arrive until sometime after September 22.