With Bungie’s latest Marathon patch, the extraction shooter’s ranked mode has finally been added to the game. While not available until the weekend, precious details about how players will climb the ladder have been revealed.
The way it works is simple: players must have a certain loadout value to first enter ranked, and can progress from Bronze to Pinnacle tiers with each tier having three separate subdivisions. To rank up you’ll need to successfully extract with a certain amount of loot value (not including what you bring in) with higher ranks requiring higher sums. You’ll of course have to fend off other players and UESC enemies while doing so.
While in ranked, you’ll also need a holotag. These are special items that add to your target score in ranked, and come in a variety of rarities which add greater sums to this target the rarer the tag. Obviously, with each player carrying a tag, killing other runners is a surefire way to bump your score up.
If you manage to successfully exfiltrate the ranked game without hitting your target, you gain no progress up the ranked ladder. If you fail to extract, you lose progress. So, you not only need to gather enough loot to hit your target, you need to escape, too. Tricky.
What do you get for this hard work? Well, aside from having a fancier badge next to your account, hitting different tiers will provide unique cosmetics to competitive-minded players. It’s worth noting, these rewards are unlocked the first time you pass a certain milestone, so if you reach Pinnacle and get booted down to Diamond tier, you should still get the prime cut cosmetic. Some rewards you get right away, some are given out at the end of a Marathon season.
There are things we still don’t know about the mode – which maps will be playable in Ranked, and whether they’ll be in some kind of rotation from Perimeter to Cryo Archive is a mystery, for example. The in-game guide mentions crews having to harvest loot value, so whether playing as a team of three is mandatory is also not entirely clear. Still, as long as you’re account level 25 and have met all factions, you should be good to go.
It’s an interesting approach to extraction game ranked, that’s for sure. While Arc Raiders offered a selection of rotating challenges – offering opportunities for players who like to fight, gather, loot, etc – this seems to dig into the two foundational tenets of Marathon: looting rare stuff and shooting other players. The requirement to meet a certain loadout value before you can queue up is itself intriguing, acting as a sort of ‘buy-in’ to the mode making progress meaningful, and loses devastating. If nothing else, it’s a sure way to thin down overflowing vaults of hoarded gear.
If this sounds like something you’re keen to try out, it’ll go live at 5PM GMT this Saturday according to the in-game clock. So, it’s probably a good idea to gather plenty of gear ahead of the day one rush. You could even try out the experimental duos mode while you do!
