Marathon’s Outpost map is an extraction masterclass, in large part due to how the central Pinwheel location lulled players in with the promise of loot. However, it wasn’t without its issues: the Destroyed Wing entrance had to be disabled shortly after it launched, and it was overall too easy to break in once players had figured out the steps.
Bungie’s given the map a thorough pass in the latest Marathon patch notes (1.0.5.2), and made some very interesting, totally not controversial changes. Content creator True Vanguard said the changes “genuinely suck for solo play” before returning five hours later after more successful runs to say “Holy frick, okay I lied”.
So what’s been done to Pinwheel? Most importantly, the Destroyed Wing entrance is back on the menu with additional steps involved, and you’ll now need three red security cards to enter the locked room in the Hub, up from two reds and a yellow. Plus, when you go to open the locked room, you’ll now face a wave of Ghost Commanders. In other words, it’s significantly harder to enter the Pinwheel than it used to be.
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Once you’re inside the strongboxes now move around from run to run, meaning you can’t just leg it to the loot and run away like before. So it’s also harder to grab the loot and escape, especially now that the final exfil location (correctly) spawns in different, random locations each match.
However, in return for making Pinwheel much more of an ordeal to break into, Bungie has also generously upped the loot quality.
Both the strongboxes and loose items are much more valuable now, with many players reporting consistent finds of Cryo Archive keys, Prestige-quality implants, cores, weapons, and even Prestige-tier salvage items. All in all, it’s a treasure trove if you can reach it and escape, which is exactly what the Pinwheel is designed to be. “Improved overall loot rewards” is a bit of a vague understatement, don’t you think, Bungie?
However, True Vanguard and others commenting since the patch raise a good point: it’s much harder for solo players to enter Pinwheel while trios likely still won’t have too much trouble getting through the upgraded security. Solo Outpost runs were already a bit messy with all the free loadouts and Assassins sneaking into Pinwheel with shotguns to piggyback off all your hard work, and that’s only more incentivised now.
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As for the loot, one Reddit user called it “meh” after wading through the “comically large wave of enemies” only to be rewarded with miscellaneous green and blue loot. On the other hand, another player called the locked room buffs “insane” after bringing home multiple Prestige items.
That’s RNG, baby. Bungie could have increased the difficulty without improving the loot. Perhaps there’s a perfect equilibrium still to be found where the requirements in solo queue return to their lower values, while trios face the harder version.
Marathon could already be very challenging at times, making losing your loot and trying to recover routine. Upping the difficulty of everyone’s favourite loot haul, even while improving the rewards in turn, was always going to cause issues, I suppose. I think it’s a fair shakeup given how profitable Pinwheel could be without actually being that hard, at least in groups.
