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Marathon’s Soulslike Endgame Dungeon Is Blowing Players Away

News RoomBy 6 Mins Read
Marathon’s Soulslike Endgame Dungeon Is Blowing Players Away

Cryo Archive is beautiful, complex, and unforgiving. Marathon players are calling the end-game map brilliant design, the most elaborate extraction shooter map ever, and the soulslike of shooters. “There’s nothing in multiplayer gaming right now quite like Cryo Archive in Marathon,” one player wrote. Here’s how it works, why it’s blowing people away, and what Bungie probably needs to do to make it less awe-inspiringly brutal in the weeks ahead.

Cryo Archive takes players to the UESC Marathon, where they have a limited amount of time to loot the first deck of the game’s abandoned colony ship. It’s a labyrinth of cryopods, medical bays, and storage wings arranged like a wheel. Players spawn in one of the outside spokes and have to scavenge for security clearance tags up to level 5 in order to open up certain doors and unlock access to other parts of the ship.

That central hub functions as a kill box. Unlike traditional multiplayer raids, Marathon pits teams against one another. While they can work together to try to overcome puzzles and tough enemy encounters together, they can also try to kill one another and steal their most valuable loot. The scale of the randomization and constant threats ramps up the tension way beyond the game’s existing maps, but that’s not even the really tough part.

The Cryo Archive is made up of seven vaults. Players need special keys to open them, which can be found both on the ship and on other maps. They have a very low drop rate and are unique to each vault, so you can’t mix and match them. Each vault also has other puzzles you need to solve to get into it. In addition to high-value salvage and gold weapons, each vault also has a unique subroutine that doesn’t always spawn. Only after collecting all six can players get into the secret seventh vault where the final boss, called The Compiler, resides, along with even rarer loot.

The Compiler fight is a bit like your average Destiny 2 raid boss. You need to complete puzzles by responding to symbols on surrounding terminals before you can damage it. Plus, some of his attacks can almost one-shot you. But unlike Destiny 2, the action isn’t over once it’s defeated. Because it’s an extraction shooter, you still need to exfil. It’s a costly, multi-run activity that is only available on the weekends. Everything about it is hostile to the average player, which is exactly why people who have become obsessed with Marathon love it.

“a version of Bungie I thought we may never see again”

All of this is why it took the first group of players to clear the Compiler fight a whopping 12 hours of playing to figure everything out and successfully get it all done. That time commitment will plummet as players practice the raid, share all of the mechanics, and get a feel for how to navigate the challenges as efficiently and safely as possible. Even then, however, you’re still always competing against the clock and other players. I expect the population of Marathon fans who ever see the Compiler first-hand, let alone defeat it, to remain very, very low.

Early Cryo Archive players are calling it a masterpiece and one of the deepest expressions of game mastery out there. “Yesterday we saw a version of Bungie I thought we may never see again,” wrote one fan. “I was convinced that the days of prestige rewards for completing brutally difficult tasks were long gone. Thank you for making Cryo Archive for those of us that have a passion for hunting these challenges.”

The uncompromising level of intricacy, challenge, and high-stakes gameplay has so far set Marathon’s first dungeon apart from anything else out there in a multiplayer shooter, but it’s not clear what its long-term legacy will be if only a select few diehard fans get to experience the totality of it.

Originally, there was concern about the map, along with Marathon‘s new ranked mode, only being available on the weekends. Now, given the gear and time commitments needed to take it on, combined with the multi-run, piecemeal way most players will chip away at it, that seems like less of an issue. It’s not like players will be graduating to the new map and only playing that moving forward.

A bigger issue seems to be the amount of RNG involved in various steps, including acquiring keys for the vaults and then getting the subroutines that aren’t always guaranteed to spawn from inside. That makes even attempting the challenge a potentially very grindy affair, and one that will potentially burn players out once the adrenaline of Cryo Archive’s launch weekend has worn off. We’ve seen this before with Destiny 2 raids. The novelty of day-one runs doesn’t always correlate with long-term replayability.

The PVP portion of the raid will also raise questions about game balance. Right now, grenades and shotguns are dominating the shootouts. While players are generally praising the range and depth of the PVE enemy encounters, a lot of the squad-on-squad action feels a lot less varied and open to experimenting with different strategies. It’ll also be interesting to see if and how the growing knowledge gap between early players and those who filter into Cryo Archive later on in the game’s life creates an even more tilted playing field.

In many ways, the map feels tailor-made to lean into the fanaticism of Marathon‘s existing fans rather than serve as a pull for winning over new ones. Like the rest of Bungie’s extraction shooter, that may not benefit the longevity of Sony’s latest live service blockbuster, but it does make for an exceptional experience unlike anything else out there at the moment.

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