Marathon will implement a limited duo queue later this week, as Bungie experiments with an alternative to lonesome solo play and hectic three-person teams in its new extraction shooter.
Revealed by game director Joe Ziegler on X, this duos test will be added starting this Wednesday, the 18th March. It’ll be a limited-time addition, allowing pairs to enter the game’s first map Perimeter to see “how the game plays with crews of two at a wider scale”.
This test is scheduled to last only two weeks, but Ziegler notes this may be extended or shortened. It’ll only be available to those opting into the duo queue, meaning those playing in trios won’t run into any sketchy crews of two.
Ziegler also notes: “Some things will be a bit jank”, with the UX not being final and other quirks bound to occur. He expands the move, stating: “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. 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.”
It’s also not going to be the final experiment conducted by Bungie, Ziegler concludes. So for now, it looks like a fun opportunity to grab a friend and try it out, providing data to the development team so they can figure out the best way to implement duo queues properly.
This addition comes after community pleas for the feature, which Bungie confirmed it had heard and was looking into following the game’s Server Slam. It also comes just as the game’s fourth map – Cryo Archive – is due to be added. This, thanks to a community effort to unlock the challenging arena through the completion of a complicated ARG.
