Bungie is adding an 'experimental' duos mode to Marathon for a few weeks: 'Some things will be a bit jank'

When it comes to matchmaking, Marathon covers the basics: You can go solo and play against only other solos, or fill in a group of three to face other squads. But the community has been vocal about the desire for a duos mode since the sever slam in February, and now Bungie's ready to give it a shot.

An "experimental" duos queue will go live in Marathon on Wednesday, March 18. It'll run on one map (Perimeter) for around two weeks, but Bungie might yank it out early or keep it around based on player feedback.

"Just a note: 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," wrote Marathon game director Joe Ziegler on X.

The duos-only Perimeter will appear as its own map option on the deployment screen, which Ziegler notes does not represent how it'll be presented in its final version.

"This likely won't be the final implementation of how it would look and flow in the game, but for now it was [the] easiest way for us to get it to you all to help us test. We're excited to run this experiment with you all. Pending what we learn, we're hoping to expand duos as a queue in the future and we wanted to take this first step sooner than later so we could understand how it affects our game better before investing a lot more time in fleshing out the feature."

As a player, duos mode sounds like a "nice to have" option for times when I have exactly one friend to play Marathon with, but I understand why Bungie is approaching it like a significant undertaking: changing the makeup of squads changes how maps flow and how players behave on them. We don't know exactly how loot is affected by player count, but I wonder if duos might also change the density of supplies in compounds.

Matchmaking times are another consideration: Marathon already splits its matchmaking into six pools (soon to be eight with Cryo Archive) by letting solos/squads specify which of the three maps they play on. Duos would introduce yet another set of queues, and the effect that's likely to have on wait times is surely part of Wednesday's test.