Marathon has concluded its first weekend of Cryo Archive, thrusting its player base (and all their good gear) into a challenging new map to explore and conquer. With new activities comes feedback, and Marathon’s game director has acknowledged a few key requests that are up for discussion internally.
These focus around three major pain points: setting it at times other than the weekend, removing the potential for incredibly important subroutines to not drop inside solved vaults, and offering an option for solo players. All of which have irked a subset of the game’s community in some form.
On X, Zieger broke down the thought process at Bungie surrounding these potential changes. “We’ve been watching and ingesting all the thoughts and feedback that we’re hearing, aggregating it and taking it down in notes,” Ziegler wrote. “After this weekend we’ll spend some time looking into feedback and thinking of the next iterations we want to make.”
Ziegler directly asks whether options for players who can’t play on weekends are possible, is there any way to play Cryo Archive outside of a crew, and can subroutines be more guaranteed as a drop from vaults?
“Any of these may take some time to figure out so I can’t guarantee quick solutions here but we’ll definitely discuss these topics as a team this week,” Ziegler noted.
Personally speaking, Cryo Archive is a lot of fun. It’s a great way to use up all the loot you’ve hoarded away during the week. However, there are some real teeth-grinding aspects to it to. Namely, for those of us without friends able to jump into the Cryo Archive, having to team up with random people can prove exceptionally frustrating when they get caught out and die, then quit out instead of hanging back and waiting for a respawn. Losing your hard-fought gear because of people you don’t know can be irksome! Losing a rare gold key card because some Thief player wasn’t awake sucks.
Even when a game goes your way, spending the time to crack open a vault and not finding a subroutine (which you need to access the Compiler boss at the finale of the boss) can make a celebratory moment feel somewhat dour. Mind you, the purple / gold loot does help to take the edge off.
And spend a moment thinking for the parents out there, the weekend workers, the humble adults who can’t spend their weekends straight up running it down with Tony and Amy from work. These folks may very well be missing out from a climactic peak of the Marathon weekly cycle. However, keeping Cryo Archive open all-week-long could inject chaos into the less-difficult maps like Perimeter and Dire Marsh. They also have to pick between Cryo and the ranked mode, which run at the same time.
It’s a hard challenge for the developers no doubt, with a substantial change potentially throwing the balance of the entire game. One wonders what will happen, if anything at all!
If the idea of taking all your goodies into a game of Marathon just to lose them all in a 10 second teamfight sounds like your cup of tea, you can read Eurogamer’s Marathon preview for an idea of what you’re getting into.
