With Bungie releasing details on Marathon’s upcoming ranked mode, which will be added in a matter of days, some have responded with confusion around how it actually works. To help, Bungie has released a truly dire resource to help: a maths test.
Posted on the official Marathon X account, a page titled the ‘Ranked Calculation Worksheet’ was presented to the public. In this single A4 page, a table breaking down the various ranked holotag values are presented at the top, followed by four questions (and a bonus one) are laid out below. You can even put your name and the date at the top. Eurogamer cannot confirm if someone at Bungie will actually grade these.
The confusion stems from the holotag system. Instead of a typical system you’d see in a regular FPS where simply staying alive or taking out other players would suffice, the extraction shooter quirks bring complications. As such, the goal of these tags seem to be pushing players to interact with all aspects of the game and genre.
Alongside this, Marathon game director Joe Zigler offered some additional insight into the thought process behind this ranked system. He wrote on X: “The general philosophy behind our upcoming ranked mode is to test you/your crew’s skill at the core loop. To us, this is about making sure that the game is about maximizing the value of your run. With this spirit a lot of the rules are built around testing you to think about what you’re ante-ing up, how you’re using it to get more out than what you brought in. Additionally, we also want to make sure the outcome of pvp interactions and high value events in this mode can be lucrative against your ante, and provide you with the option to get even more out of the session if you take the risk to do them.
“In other words: in ranked you’re gonna be rewarded for taking risks, but taking risks means you also put yourself in danger of losing something. The further you advance in ranks the more you can risk (and in some ways have to risk to advance) and the more you have to lose if your ambitions don’t pan out.”
It’s an exciting time for Marathon for certain, with players at the precipice of gaining access to the Cryo Archive following an arduous battle to solve a complicated ARG. While some of the in-game challenges are present, the map itself remains locked-off for now. Still, with ranked coming in just a few days, this competitive mode should offer some added spice to the experience while everyone waits.
