The Cord: Marathon Season 2.5

Well, well, well… What do we have here?

In a surprise Tuesday update from the Marathon Dev Team, we’ve just gotten a roadmap for the rest of Season 2: Nightfall. We now know that Season 2 will end on September 22nd, meaning that Season 2 will last for 15 total weeks, 3 weeks longer than Season 1 did. One has to wonder whether this decision was always intended or whether it was deliberately delayed to give Nightfall more room to breathe following its rocky launch. However, it seems that we’ve had more options added to the menu that may point towards why Season 2 was actually extended.

Midseason starts on July 21st, and with it, an unprecedented slew of content, chief among these additions will be “Vault Breaker” the long teased “PvE mode”. Before we dive into Vault Breakers and what that’ll have to offer for dedicated players and those who are more on the fence, we will briefly cover the second major upgrade: Cradle Evolution.

Season 2 introduced The Cradle, a skill-tree-esque menu that took the place of runner shell upgrades that were previously conveyed to players through faction for specific salvage. Cradle’s current iteration allows players to crunch almost anything in their vault for  “Cradle XP”, and each “Cradle Level” allows you one point to invest into one of 6 skill trees: Strength, Recharge, Dexterity, Endurance, Support, and Resistance, with each branch granting runners increased performance in those aspects, with benchmark “perks” along each path.

During the midseason shake up, The Cradle will see Marathon’s first attempt at a prestige system, as players will be allowed to reset their Cradle upon reaching max level. The rewards for this include cosmetics, runner styles, and, most importantly, one additional maximum Cradle Level (The current Cradle maxes at level 70, a prestige would allow you 71 points, for example). Many of the game's higher-end players maxed their Cradles within the first few weeks thanks to the loot economy chaos caused by the supercharged freekits distributed during Season 2's launch issues, so one could expect certain players to benefit greatly from this and be incentivized by Cradle prestige cosmetics.

Finally, the big ticket item is going to be the implementation of a true PvE mode, Vault Breakers, which has already drawn interest from members of the community who feel a bit too alienated by Cryo Archive’s brutality.

Vault Breaker will allow players to load into the endgame map as trios, duos, or solos to engage a series of increasingly challenging vaults. The mode is predicated on a mode-specific sponsored kit, the strength of which evolves with progress made in the mode; no gear can be exfilled save for a mode-specific currency, Vault Data, which can be used to exchange for upgrades to the mode-specific sponsored kit, or curated gear that can be used in the game’s main modes. A key point; this is a completely separated experience from the game’s normal loop, the economy is separated outside of Vault Data. The draws? Vault Breaker will allow players to explore Cryo Archive without the constant threat of enemy runners, and it will have its own cosmetic and codex rewards. While players can use this mode to engage the game’s final boss, The Compiler, it has been clarified that S’phticide skins will not be awarded for this mode, but it will have its own unique completion rewards.

This morning I had a pit in my stomach when it was revealed during the normal Tuesday update that Ganglion Barters would return as infinite barters, not limited by day or any other interval. The feeling I got was not dissimilar from when I’d put two and two together that Season 2’s runner, Sentinel, would be the de facto answer to the grenade spam issue that plagued Season 1. I may have just been in a particularly bad or anxious mood this morning, but I would not describe that ominous gut feeling as optimistic, it made me immediately think that the infinite barters would be left for something in the future related to the game’s turn towards a more casual experience. The logic, to me, was that there’d be no reason to limit ganglion barters if there was going to be a way for everyone to catch up and not be as oppressed by pinnacle runners with endless reserves of rodeo mags.

While I am glad to say that my pessimism was misplaced, it did turn out to be true, something was going to be implemented in the way of a more casual experience, but it is not what I could’ve ever imagined; it’s much, much better. To be fair, it never did cross my mind that PvE Cryo was even on the table, but seeing the reactions from lesser represented members of the community have told me that Bungie has made exactly the right call here. High level players are incredibly intrigued and those who are not quite as skilled are elated, to say the least. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out within the games community to be sure. However, I, much like I have to imagine Bungie is, am far more interested in seeing how Vault Breaker might usher in a completely new demographic of players who have sat on the sidelines waiting for the UESC Marathon to call to them.