Bungie has been relatively quick to act on major points of feedback it has received from players on Marathon. The team has already pushed patches on major issues or at least communicated that it will push more fixes in a future update while directly citing the problems players have. Now, it’s responding to yet another point of feedback, but in a more experimental way.
Game director Joe Ziegler shared on his personal X (formerly Twitter) account that the studio will be “going a bit rogue here,” and will start testing out duo lobbies beginning this Wednesday, March 18, for the next two week, though it may be cut short or elongated depending on how the test is going.
In any game that lets you run as a solo or in a squad of three, duo lobbies are almost always the first thing players ask for, and Marathon has been no different. It’s something the studio already noted it had heard fans on during the Server Slam, and with how quick Bungie has been so far in its reactions to feedback, it’s not too surprising to see them already start to test out duos.
Marathon’s test of duo lobbies will be fairly limited, at least to start. Besides the fact that the length of the experiment isn’t set in stone, it’ll only be available on the Perimeter map to start, with players matched only with other teams of two. You will not be able to load into a duos match as a solo player, and you will only be able to load into a duos match if you’re already playing with someone. That means you can’t queue into a duos lobby and get matchmade with another squad member. You must already have someone in your lobby you’re playing with before you queue up for duos. Ziegler also made sure to note that “some things will be a bit jank.”
“This is a bit of an experimental feature so we expect to learn some things along the way and make changes to future versions of this,” Ziegler adds. “This likely won’t be the final implementation of how it would look and flow in the game, but for now it was easiest way for us to get it to you all to help us test. We’re so excited to run this experiment with you all. Pending what we learn, we’re hoping to expand duos as a queue in the future and we wanted to take this first step sooner than later so we could understand how it affects our game better before investing a lot more time in fleshing out the feature. Additionally, this is unlikely to be the last experiment we run, so look forward to more as we continue to evolve Marathon.”
A lot of players might assume that something like duo queues in a game where you can either run as a solo or in a squad of three is as easy as flipping a switch to only match duos together. If you want to be reductive about it, sure, it’s that easy. But that ignores all of the balancing efforts that goes into establishing a good mix of character (Runner Shell) abilities, weapon balancing, AI-enemy (UESC) balancing, and a whole swath of elements.
It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment goes, and what other changes come out of it, whether they are made exclusively for duos lobbies or are inserted across the rest of the game. At least you’ll have yet another option for how you go about preparing for Marathon’s endgame raid, Cryo Archive, which seems to be around the corner.
For more on Marathon, check out our hub page with all of our coverage, and check out my in-progress-review that will be updated with a score once Cryo Archive is out and I’ve had the chance to play it.
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