Bungie’s new extraction shooter Marathon is out now on consoles and PC. It’s a good time. But the battle pass in this game is one of the worst I’ve seen, with a lot of boring recolored camos, one new skin, and quantity-limited stickers. And if you spend money on the premium version of the pass, you don’t earn any premium currency back. Ouch.
When I booted up Marathon and got through the game’s tutorial and initial onboarding process, I didn’t hop right into a run. Instead, I poked around the store and the reward pass, aka battle pass. These weren’t in the open beta last month, so I was curious how Bungie and Sony are looking to monetize the next big live-service game from PlayStation.
When I looked yesterday, I was disappointed to find $15 cosmetic bundles and $12 skins hanging out in Marathon’s digital store. Keep in mind, this is a $40 game. So if you buy four skins or three cosmetic bundles, you’ll have spent more on those few items than you did on the game itself. Not a fan of that. But a bigger issue is what comes in the paid battle pass.
What’s in Marathon’s first reward pass?
Marathon’s first battle pass works a lot like other battle passes found in games like Fortnite. Everyone has access to the free version of the pass, but there are premium rewards locked behind a paywall. In Marathon, you’ll need to cough up $10 to unlock the full pass. And nearly all of the free and premium reward items are meh or straight-up bad.
Most of the cosmetics included are basic color swaps that don’t make me excited to grind away on unlocking them. There’s a new skin for Vandal, which is probably the coolest part of the pass, since it’s a skin directly inspired by how she appears in the awesome short film Bungie released last year. But there’s only one. There’s also a new shotgun camo that mimics Vandal’s spiky-black reward skin. As for the rest, bleh.
Shades of Destiny 2‘s consumable shaders
Perhaps the most annoying cosmetics included in the pass are the stickers you can place on your weapons. That’s neat, but for some reason, Bungie has made it so you get a limited supply of these stickers and can’t apply them to all your weapons. Why? I don’t know. It makes zero sense to me and seems like something that might change in the future because it just feels really hostile to the player.
Crappier than that, if you buy the premium pass and unlock everything, you end up with 0 new premium currency to spend on the next reward pass. Most video games these days understand that you have to give players at least some premium currency to help them purchase the next pass. Fortnite and others are more generous and offer you enough premium currency in the paid pass to buy the next one, rewarding players for grinding and, in the process, keeping them hooked.
Marathon doesn’t do any of this, which makes this one of the worst value battle passes around, something many in the community have pointed out. That’s especially weird since Helldivers 2 already solved most of these problems. You can earn premium currency from the pass and by playing, and most players are having such a good time, they don’t think twice about buying a new helmet or cape they want.
The best thing I can say about the battle pass in Marathon is that, like Helldivers 2‘s, they aren’t time-limited. So you can take as long as you want, earning all the items in a pass before moving on to the next one. That’s nice. I just hope future passes are better so I actually want to grind for all the rewards they hold.