Marathon players have been hard at work over the weekend, piecing together hidden clues and unlocking a glimpse at the game’s next big map. While it’s still early days, it looks as though they’ve cracked a major milestone.
But first, a recap on the progress so far. It was discovered soon after launch that several wall terminals were turned on around the map Perimeter. Walking next to one of these terminals showed a specific location elsewhere on the map, which when travelled to played a mysterious voice log from Durandal – a crucial character from Marathon’s lore.
There are three pairs of these terminals in total, each with their own voice log. These terminals also held another secret, small breadcrumbs that investigative Marathon players pieced together which pointed to a special website: Cryoarchives Systems.
We know that Cryoarchives is the fourth map coming to Marathon, but how exactly to unlock it has been a mystery. Well, if you go to the website, you’ll see different security camera feeds. Some are clear while others are static, but what’s important to note is that upon first discovery, everything was obscured save for three loading bars on three feeds. This stumped folks for a while, as getting this bars to progress was a struggle.
Well as of early this morning UK time, players solved it. By going back to Perimeter and initiating the audio log on certain terminals in order, these bars gradually filled up revealing a shot of the next map. As of writing, there are no more loading bars, but six more feeds are looping “re-establish connection”. The assumption is, players will have to do a similar task on the two remaining playable maps: Dire Marsh and Outpost.
Once this is complete, one assumes Cryo Archive will be unlocked and playable. It’s set to be the hardest map yet, all while a fair share of the week-one community have their hands full fending off challenging PvE fights and vicious PvP encounters. Whichever way you feel about the difficulty in Marathon, things should heat up even further very soon.
If you’ve not had a chance to play Marathon yet, you can read Eurogamer’s preview (based on the pre-release Server Slam). In it, Connor Makar wrote: “Fighting in Marathon is fast and fierce. Ignore the naysayers: the Time-to-kill is just perfect – shields break in a fraction of a second with this ear-pleasing crumble, and getting the jump on somebody is a surefire way to snap them out of a game before they can turn their mic on to yell expletives at you.”
