Last week, Bungie announced that they were deprecating the duo queue until next Season, a move that shocked a lot of us playing the game. However, in that same announcement they did tease a new experimental queue releasing on April 15th - and today we found out from Zeigler on X what that is going to be!
Free Kit Frenzie!
Starting on the 15th, a new queue called Dire Marsh - Sponsored will become available in which all players will need to enter with only a free sponsored kit. From there, players will need to loot from the environment to upgrade their loadout and try to extract. You’ll be able to enter the queue as a premade duo, a trio, or solo (but you’ll need to crew fill).
The goal of this queue appears to be for Bungie to gather data on the early game ecosystem, how runs will feel when the entire lobby is entering battling it out with free weapons, and how the “zero to hero” feeling will be affected by a low starting gear set conditions.
From my perspective, this will give great insight into how rewarding the environment is for players that may not have a vault full of high level gear and whether that reward needs to increase or decrease. That being said though, I wouldn’t say I’m super excited for this game mode? To me, a free kit is the perfect chance to go for that “zero to hero” moment, and if everyone on the map is loading in with zero then that hero level is going to be much less exciting.
In any case, this seems like a good queue for a few warm up runs prior to loading in with a real loadout, and it gives me a chance to FINALLY complete those Dire Marsh contracts to keep progressing in the game, so I will play it - just not as much as I played duos (RIP).
Experimental Queues: What Are They?
Experimental Queues seem to be Bungie’s way of testing how certain aspects of the game are working. For example, the Duo Queue allowed them to see how a game clearly designed to be played in trios would fair in a duo environment. It also lets them release things in a “less-than-complete feature set”, which to me is almost leaning into the Early Access philosophy of many indie games and is pretty damn cool to see in a AAA game like Marathon.
They will only run one experiment at a time to avoid splitting up the player base too much, and once they gather the adequate data from the experiment, they then make the decision on whether they should star working on a permanent version of that queue to release down the road.
Experimental Queues We Want To See
Now that Experimental Queues seem to be sticking around, I’ve started to think about a few that I’d like to see down the road:
- Rook Only Solos - one of the things I don’t enjoy in solos is the Shell based gameplay. I think it is phenomenal for duos/trios, but in solos it just feels like some Shells are clearly better than others. A Rook Only Solo queue on Outpost would put everyone on an equal playing field and to me would be super fun!
- Large Squads - squads of 4, 5, even up to 10 is something I’ve always wanted to experience in an extraction shooter like Marathon. I think it would be really, really interesting to see how this game would play with large squad based battles. Bungie could even had large boss fights that require a bigger group, with multiple of these groups vying for the boss’s loot.
- World Events - adding a queue that included experimental world events like new bosses, new map conditions, etc. would be an ideal way to test the balance of these additions without making them permanent.
The sky really is the limit here, and it’s awesome to see Bungie taking chances on fresh features in the live game!
See you on Tau Ceti!