When it comes to matchmaking, Marathon covers the basics: You can go solo and play against only other solos, or fill in a group of three to face other squads. But the community has been vocal about the desire for a duos mode since the sever slam in February, and now Bungie’s ready to give it a shot.
An “experimental” duos queue will go live in Marathon on Wednesday, March 18. It’ll run on one map (Perimeter) for around two weeks, but Bungie might yank it out early or keep it around based on player feedback.
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Alright everyone we’re going a bit rogue here. We have a bit of an experimental feature that’s in development we want to test and we’d love for you to help. As of Wednesday morning 3/18 at 10am PT, we’ll be enabling a limited time duos queue on Perimeter only to test how the game…March 16, 2026
As a player, duos mode sounds like a “nice to have” option for times when I have exactly one friend to play Marathon with, but I understand why Bungie is approaching it like a significant undertaking: changing the makeup of squads changes how maps flow and how players behave on them. We don’t know exactly how loot is affected by player count, but I wonder if duos might also change the density of supplies in compounds.
Matchmaking times are another consideration: Marathon already splits its matchmaking into six pools (soon to be eight with Cryo Archive) by letting solos/squads specify which of the three maps they play on. Duos would introduce yet another set of queues, and the effect that’s likely to have on wait times is surely part of Wednesday’s test.
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