Players beg for it. Developers shake their heads. But eventually it gets added. Marathon is the latest multiplayer game that’s getting a duos mode following tons of requests. It’s only coming for a limited time, but I suspect if all goes well, it might stick around for the long haul.
“Alright, everyone, we’re going a bit rogue here,” posted game director Joe Ziegler on Monday afternoon. “We have a bit of an experimental feature that’s in development, we want to test, and we’d love for you to help. As of Wednesday morning 3/18 at 10am PT, we’ll be enabling a limited time duos queue on Perimeter only to test how the game plays with crews of 2 at a wider scale.”
The plan is to run the test for two weeks. There won’t be matchmaking so players can only load into duos mode via pre-made groups. They’ll then be matched only with other duos squads. This feature clearly wasn’t originally planned for launch and is coming in hot. The UX for it is in flux and Ziegler admits “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 added. “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.”
He confirmed that the goal is to make duos a permanent queue option, presumably across other maps as well, if things go well over the next couple of weeks. Keeping the number of players constant across modes will mean ramping up the number of teams overall for duos, which could lead to some unexpected interactions. Maps might be cleared out of loot and enemies faster, or firefights might be so frequent that it’s even more frenetic carnage than usual.
It’ll also be interesting to see whether the matchmaking times are reasonable, considering this could potentially split the existing big but not giant player base even more. It’s not the last test Bungie plans to run like this, so it sounds like we’ll be getting experiments with other new features and tweaks as well.
Marathon has a decent audience on Steam, but it isn’t anywhere near as big as a blockbuster first-party Sony game might need to be in order to remain sustainable over the long term. It’s cool to see the team iterating this quickly just a week after launch. Cryo, the endgame map, is slated to arrive later this week.
