Marathon approaches its new season and the first seasonal reset. Season 2 introduces a new zone, Night Marsh, with dedicated tools to fight in the dark, alongside new weapons, Runner Shell, and a way to customize your stats.
Here’s a breakdown of the new content in Marathon Season 2: NIGHTFALL coming on June 2.
Everything coming to Marathon in Season 2
Night Marsh
Night Marsh is a new zone coming to Marathon in Season 2, and it’s a night version of Dire Marsh. On top of extremely low visibility, Night Marsh introduces new mechanics, enemies, and even hallucinations due to a stronger Anomaly presence, creating a survival horror experience.
To survive the new environment, there’s a range of equipment designed to fight in the dark:
- Flashlights : New tool all Runners have access to on Night Marsh.
- Vector rounds : New type of mag which creates pools of light where your bullets land, illuminating enemy Runners and combatants.
- Vector grenades : Grenades that highlight the environment and illuminate nearby enemies.
- Darksight scopes : Scopes that highlight the environment around you after you ADS for a brief period. These are focused on traversal versus highlighting enemies.
- Signal Flares : Items that light up the environment and come in multiple colors.
Mechanics on Night Marsh are similar to those on Outpost. Kill UESC to gather their encryption certificates (aka Certs), and hack into Network Towers across the map to get supplies. Gather enough UESC Certs to access the upper rooms of Complex. You also need Certs to activate exfils on Night Marsh.
Night Marsh will be available alongside Dire Marsh for at least the first week of the season. After that, the two maps will rotate every 90 minutes. However, you can complete most of the Dire Marsh contracts on either map.
Snetinel Runner Shell
Sentinel is a new defensive Runner Shell. It’s designed to control space using the Defender System and track down enemies in its vicinity. Sentinel comes with its own set of Runner Cores, including those that improve sustain for you and your team.
Here are all of Sentinel’s abilities:
- Defender System (Prime ability): Deploy a defensive platform that harmlessly neutralizes incoming explosives. You and your allies gain increased weapon stability and reload speed when standing near the device.
- Snare Mine (Tactical ability): Toss a proximity-triggered mine that detonates into several immobilizing submunitions when enemies get too close.
- Prey Tracker (Trait): Activate motion tracking systems in your HUD that allow you to see moving enemies on radar within a conical zone in front of you.
- Castle Doctrine (Passive): SMGs, Pistols, and Shotguns have increased handling and reload based on the number of nearby hostiles. When you take splash damage, your Hardware, Firewall, and Self-Repair Speed are increased for a short time.
The Cradle
The Cradle completely changes the way you approach stat upgrades in Marathon. Instead of levelling a specific faction to get the stat upgrade, everything is now concentrated in The Cradle. At the same time, factions now have expanded Armory offerings to make up for stat upgrades.
Earn Cradle XP by dismantling unneeded gear and then choose which stats to upgrade on the Runner Shell. Hitting certain breakpoints unlocks additional perks for your Shells. While The Cradle’s progress resets every season, the progression is shared across all Shells. There are also no penalties for stat reallocation, allowing you to experiment with different builds.
Weapons, mods, and Implants
Bungie has made a balance pass on plenty of gear, while adding a few new items to keep the game fresh. There are new weapons, Implants, weapon Chips, and more that will define the meta for the next few months.
Two new weapons are coming to Marathon:
- KKV-9SD : Pistol-frame SMG with an integrated suppressor.
- D54 Battle Pistol : High-handling, medium rate-of-fire sidearm.
There are eight new chips, including:
- Brain Freeze : Precision downs and kills with this weapon create a small explosion that spreads Frost to nearby hostiles.
- Alarmist : After aiming down sights for a brief duration, projectile impacts create a terrifying proximity drone alert.
- Scrapyard : Defeating hostiles with this weapon has a chance to spawn depleted heal items or standard materials.
Lastly, the Implants are now defined by their perk first and have fixed stats. Stats scale with rarity, and some of the Implants, like Logic Bomb and Triage Cloaking Device, now only exist at higher rarity tiers.
PvE, Duos, and more queues
With Season 2, Bungie is experimenting more with different modes and queues. The Duo queue is now a daily rotating playlist for Perimeter, Dire Marsh, Night Marsh, and Outpost. Season 2 will also bring two modes with increased focus on PvE.
One mode launches at the beginning of the season on June 2 and focuses more on PvE, but with a light touch of PvP. The second mode launches later in the season and is PvE-only, focused on crews completing objectives together and making progress across matches.
More details about the PvE modes are coming later. This is on top of improvements to faction progression, Ranked progression, and more coming to Marathon in Season 2.
