Bungie’s live-service game is changing its update model. The question is whether this change will work out for them.

According to the company, Bungie will update Marathon differently in the future. It is moving away from a strict seasonal schedule to give the team greater flexibility to develop, test, and refine features before release. Consequently, content originally planned for this month’s seasonal update has been postponed until December. A minor update will be released in October to reset progress, update rewards, and improve the gameplay experience. The Nightfall update, releasing on October 6, will provide all Marathon players with a fresh starting point. According to Bungie, this change was necessary because season-related issues caused some players to quickly reach the endgame while others fell behind.

This made it difficult for players to join Extraction mode and prevented the reset from working as intended, according to Bungie. October gives them the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned and create a more balanced progression experience. The October update will also bring back the Vault Breaker PvE mode for a limited time. Additional gameplay experiments will take place between the October update and the December Symbiosis update. PvE will finally become a permanent mode. There will also be a new Runner shell, a social area with a shooting range, an experimental Team Deathmatch mode, and numerous other improvements.

“Symbiosis is only the beginning of what we’re working toward. As players spend time with these updates and share their feedback, we’ll continue refining and expanding Marathon. We’ll share more about our plans for the future through Dev Insights videos and regular development updates. Our first blog post about Marathon’s future plans is scheduled for later this month, in which we will discuss how we will evolve Marathon into a more alien and dynamic survival experience,” wrote Bungie.

Memories of Destiny 2 likely play a major role here—a game that abandoned its seasonal model a few years ago in favor of episodes, which didn’t save the game. Especially given Marathon‘s declining concurrent player count on Steam, such an overhaul, especially for a relatively new game, feels like a “last-ditch effort.”

Source: PCGamer, Bungie