Marathon confirms its wipes aren't optional and lays out ambitious plans for first two seasons

While there were certainly a few creases to iron out, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Marathon's Server Slam last weekend. Even with limited progression and content, it was an excellent glimpse at what Bungie has been cooking. Now, roughly 48 hours before its full launch, the studio has revealed some of its post-launch plans for Marathon. As well as showing us what's to come in Season 1: First Step and Season 2: Nightfall (a name other Destiny players like myself might find familiar and surprising), it's also confirmed that account wipes will be mandatory, unlike rival extraction shooter Arc Raiders.

Season 1 begins as soon as Marathon launches on Thursday, March 5, with the lineup of content that we mostly got to play with in the Server Slam. At the start of the season, there'll be seven Runner Shells (including the Rook, which acts as your risk-free way to hoover up some loot if your vault is looking sparse); three maps; six factions fleshed out with plenty of quests and upgrades; 28 guns; and loads of attachments, cores, implants, and consumable items for you to loot and purchase from the factions.

However, a fourth playable zone, Cryo Archive, will arrive soon after launch, but only once the community unlocks it… Hmmmm. Set aboard the drifting Marathon ship, this is essentially the endgame map of Season 1, where the biggest threats and secrets reside. The FPS game is also getting a ranked mode in the "second half of March," and throughout the rest of Season 1 you'll see a new gun, new implants, and some weapon tuning arrive to keep the meta feeling fresh.

Bungie says that each three-month season of Marathon "will have a different theme and a unique combination of new features, content, and stories," and it's already making good on that by revealing some of what's to come in Season 2. A night variant of the Dire Marsh map will arrive, as will a new Runner Shell. The announcement post also says that "UESC reinforcements flood in," which sounds to me like new enemy types.

New content is great, but one of the biggest snags of any extraction shooter is account wiping. Dedicated players of course love it - it keeps things fresh, gives you something to chase for each season, and prevents endless power creeping and loot hoarding. But for more casual folks, it can often feel disappointing - it's the main reason why Embark Studios has gone for an optional reset system in Arc Raiders, for example.

However, as was widely expected from what Bungie has been saying about Marathon in the build-up to launch, wipes will be mandatory for everyone. "Each season of Marathon brings a clean slate for the whole community with progression resets," it says. "These resets include everyone's gear, contract progression, faction progression, and player level." It assures that progression in your Codex, which houses challenges and snippets of lore, will remain intact, and any cosmetic items you own won't be wiped either - they'll carry over from season to season.

I personally have zero issue with mandatory wipes - I think for a game with a strict seasonal structure where storylines and themes will dramatically shift at the start of each one, the "clean slate" approach is the right one. For the more flexible Arc Raiders, being optional makes sense. There's no definite right or wrong way to go about this, but Marathon's approach certainly carries a higher risk of irking casual players, especially those who may have just got into the extraction game scene through Arc Raiders' unexpected popularity.