Extraction shooters are known for being harsh, but even within the genre, Marathon is a bit of an outlier when it comes to just how unforgiving it can be. There’s no way to safeguard your loot and very little incentive for other players not to immediately shoot you on sight. Bungie recently tried to inject more incentives to cooperate and be nice to one another. The results so far have been fascinating, including some players finding clever ways to make the game even more brutal.
The sci-fi multiplayer game recently received a mid-season update with an unexpectedly robust set of new additions and changes. Those included a new item called Mercy Kits. These give players a way to revive opponents who are downed but not out. The idea is that even if you let guns do the talking, players still have a chance to get on proximity chat and agree to some sort of truce. Then the one player can use a Mercy Kit to bring the other back to life, and maybe, just maybe, they even decide to Exfil together for some bonus rewards.
Or you could do what X user Marathonaire did and use the Mercy Kits to troll unsuspecting players begging for their lives. In this case, they downed a Rook with a shotgun, then apologized and promised to offer them a Mercy Kit. Marathonaire even took a purple gun out of their backpack to give as a peace offering. The other player, confused, finally picked up the gun only for Marathonaire to immediately drop them again with the shotgun. “I’m a sick bastardy,” they wrote.
Im a sick bastard https://t.co/6s8476xqXq pic.twitter.com/Mwdws9AgVh
— marathonaire (@marathonaire) April 16, 2026
It’s hard to know just how widespread this particular level of twisted Marathon behavior is, though another player earlier in the week did report similar occurrences elsewhere across Tau Ceti IV. “All I’ve seen so far is people wanting to use it to kill someone again,” they wrote to creative director Julia Nardin. “Karma will find them,” she responded. If Marathon has taught me anything, it’s that there is not, in fact, any karma to be had in its far-flung, corpo-ruled future. The Mercy Kits are already being called the “most troll-friendly item imaginable.”
But Bungie’s experiment with trying to encourage more merciful behavior on Tau Ceti has had some other interesting consequences as well. Another big change was the addition of a currency called CyberAcme commendations that players can turn in to level up faction ranks more quickly. The way to get them is to Exfil with players who aren’t already in your squad. Doing so also now nets bonus rank-up progress from completed contracts. The overall effect is to make players think twice about gunning one another down at the Exfil location.
Some Marathon runners still haven’t gotten the memo.
You can take Tau Ceti out of the state of nature but you can’t take the state of nature out of Tau Ceti. pic.twitter.com/RnW3Cr57Al
— AmericanTruckSongs9 (@ethangach) April 16, 2026
That was certainly one sort of experience I’ve been having this week since the patch went live. In one instance, I arrived at an Exfil on Perimeter, where another player was already camping. Instead of immediately firing our weapons and finding cover, we paused just long enough to both send out “friendly” emotes and quickly start tea-bagging, the universal gesture for “don’t shoot” in the extraction games. Then, in my next match, I arrived at an Exfil that I didn’t realize had already been activated, only to be immediately blown up by a Destroyer hiding just off-site.
Instead of letting me Exfil while downed, he finished me off. At least I didn’t get the Mercy Kit fake-out, I suppose. But I think this is good actually. Instead of tilting Marathon‘s ambient player psychology too far in the direction of “we’re all friends, how dare you shoot first and ask questions later,” there remains an important tension to every encounter, especially when playing solo. Reaping the rewards of cooperation still requires players to put themselves at risk and go out on a limb.
The swift defeat of making the wrong call is only matched by the incredible relief when the other player also decides to put down their weapon. And the sick bastards still running around Tau Ceti, well, they’re what keeps it interesting.