Bungie has pushed its mid-season refresh update for Marathon, which comes with a lot of balance tweaks to weapons, Runner Shell abilities, equipment, and weapon mods, while also introducing tweaks to progression. There's also yet another experimental queue getting added to the game as the Duos experiment comes to a conclusion.
If you want to dig into all of the tweaks and changes, big and small, you can check them out in the patch notes here. As you can imagine, there are several worth highlighting, so let's begin with some of the bigger changes impacting the game overall, before digging into some of the smaller, but still noteworthy tweaks.
First are changes that are seemingly meant to encourage more collaborative play amidst Marathon's 'kill-or-be-killed' tone. The update introduces C.A.R.R.I., which stands for the CyberAcme Runner Reinforcement Initiative. It's essentially a new change to the progression system that rewards you for collaborating and cooperating with your Runner teammates, and even with enemy Runners if you choose to form a tense alliance with someone who could ultimately stab you in the back at any point.
You'll earn what's called 'CyberAcme Commendations' for working with other Runners to complete contracts together and successfully exfil together. Bungie also added a new 'Stay Together' feature that appears at the end of a run, which gives you the option to stay with the squad you just ran with if you all found playing with each other to be enjoyable. And it works even if only one of you is able to successfully exfil. So long as all three members stay connected to the match, you'll be able to run it back and try again.
There's also a couple of new pieces of equipment that encourage more peace between Runners, even those not in your squad. Depleted Self-Revives are a new piece of equipment introduced with this update which only appear during solo runs. Like other depleted consumables, you can't take them back to the lobby with you and will be auto-sold at the end of a successful run. The other new piece of equipment is the Mercy Kit, a consumable you can use to revive a downed enemy Runner.
Between adding more self-revives to the map with a depleted variant, adding a piece of equipment solely for helping out an enemy player, and progression incentives for working with other Runners, it seems like Bungie is loosening Marathon's lethal tone ever so slightly, to at least provide more windows for players who'd rather not engage with PvP the chance to work with other players not on their squad.
Next are changes to some of the individual Runner shells, one of which was at least sorely needed. That would be the Recon shell, which gets a much-needed buff across all its abilities. The Tracker Drone's tracking strength and turn rate have been improved, its travel speed has been reduced when it doesn't yet have an active target so it doesn't get automatically stuck as easily, and it will now reevaluate its targets. If it can't reach its original intended target, instead of just exploding and being a waste, it will at least try to find a new target.
The other major buff is that the Echo Pulse will no longer be as visible as it was, so Recon players aren't pinging themselves as much as they are enemy players. Signal Jammers will also no longer work against Recon's Echo Pulse ability, and the ability will better distinguish between enemy Runners and UESC bots.
Those are all massive changes for the Recon shell, which is now far more useful than before. Changes to Marathon's other shells aren't as significant, though one worth mentioning is that the Thief shell's Pickpocket Drone can now only carry one Claymore maximum. So no stashing as many as possible on top of the drone to try and take out a whole squad with a surprise attack.
Lastly, the rest of the notable changes go to the weapon tweaks. Railguns have been given several buffs to make them "a more competitive option as a mid-to-long range archetype," and Bungie has added 11 new Deluxe Unique weapons to find on Perimeter and Dire Marsh. These weapons will each have mods only found with their deluxe variants, making them extremely valuable if you can find one.
There's also a new batch of cosmetics for players to earn through the Rewards Pass, as Bungie previously promised there would be, and game director Joe Zeigler has announced that the team will be trying another new experimental queue. The Duos experiment is over for now, and Ziegler has confirmed that Duos will return as a proper feature for Season 2.
The new experimental queue is a Sponsored Kit experiment, where players are only allowed to load in with Sponsored Kits that, according to Ziegler, "is focused on learning a bit more about our early gear ecosystem." It'll be limited to Dire Marsh to start, and will likely provide some interesting combat scenarios.
For more on Marathon, check out our review and see why we think it's one of the best games to release in 2026 so far.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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