The mid-season update of Season 1 for Marathon is now live. Update 1.0.6 brings much-needed buffs for several runner shells as well as balance changes to weapons, but more curiously are new features that allows players to be nice with each other and be rewarded for it.
Marathon (2026), or Nu Marathon, has built a reputation of being a hardcore extraction shooter. The reason for that is simple: there’s not enough reason to not kill another runner not on your crew. The mechanics simply reward you better for taking out another rival on sight.
The new update adds a bunch of new different features that altogether should make your 25-minute-long runs on Tau Ceti IV (or 30 minutes inside the UESC Marathon) to be a more friendlier space, either among random runners that got matchmade into a crew, among other rival runners, and even for solo players.
One of these features come from the introduction of the C.A.R.R.I. or CyberAcme Runner Reinforcement Initiative. You can now earn CyberAcme Commendations for doing the following:
- Complete contract objectives
- Completing contract objectives as a solo Runner
- Successfully exfiling as a Rook
- Exfilling with other players outside your crew
Commendations can be traded for Salvage Crates that reward random Salvage Items and Reputation Packs. The former awards random salvage items used for barter or faction upgrades. The latter awards reputation for the associated faction the pack is for.
What this means is that you can now make more progress through the Season in Marathon. Completing objectives was already incentivised in the base game, but now solo players, and those who just loves to rat it out as Rook, can still play and able to make some progress by trading Commendations.
On top of that, there’s good reason to negotiate for safe passage with rival crews or players during exfil. Jumping on, or getting jumped on, a rival crew right when exfilling is fun high-risk shenanigans, but at least there’s incentive for cooler heads to hold fire and not do anything stupid.
Marathon 1.0.6 Update Adds Depleted Self Revives For Solos, Mercy Kits For Reviving Enemy Players
On top of that, Marathon also has added a Depleted Self Revive item that can be found on-site for solo players. Self Revives are available for solo play, but these are not available right from the get-go (and are now made one tier rarer with this update).
Depleted Self Revives get auto-sold on exfil similar to Depleted Patch Kits and Depleted Shield Charges, but now there’s a chance you get lucky to find one out in the wild while in a solo run so even newer players can get back up when they’re down-but-not-out (DBNO) instead of automatically giving up. There’s no way you can get back up when you’re playing solo.
However, now there is with Update 1.0.6. Players can be revived from DBNO state if an enemy runner, another player, uses the Mercy Kit. And inversely too, you can choose to mercy someone after downing them. You cannot revive anyone that has dropped the body-size bag of loot, however.
Curiously, Rook will have a Mercy Kit by default now. So should you get jumped by a Rook who happens to make use of those pesky Claymores and just so happens to spawn with the sauce that is the WSTR shotgun, there’s still a chance to sweet talk your way via proximity chat and beg for Rook’s mercy (kit). Though who can be sure if anyone that mercied you won’t just shoot you again to assert dominance.
Developers Bungie might be encouraging Marathon players to be nice, but half of season (about a month and a half since launch) has made some of these runners as blueblood killers. Whether these additions change the dynamics of player interaction in Marathon in large scale remains to be seen, but at least there are now options and avenues that attempts to make the rare friendly interaction with enemy players happen slightly more often.
Marathon Update 1.0.6 Runners Buffed, Railguns Buffed
Other notable changes that comes with Marathon Update 1.0.6 is buffs for runner shells and weapons. The runner shell Recon gets much-needed love by making her ultimate ability more useful and have more utility than those TAD pings you can find in some parts of the maps. The buff for Vandal is only one note, a reduction of her ultimate’s cooldown timer, but having to wait 30 seconds less before she can go do her thing is not nothing.
Other runners have some slight changes as well.
Those who felt the railguns are not good will need to check out the new changes to the weapon archetype. You can now indefinitely hold your charge, so the railgun can be fired exactly when you peek out instead of having to really time your shots correctly. A lot of the stats for the two railguns, Zeus and Ares, have been buffed too.
There are also new unique weapons, rated at Deluxe (blue, Tier 3) rarity. Unique weapons were previously uncovered when players entered the Cryo Archive which had Prestige (gold, Tier 5) variants of existing weapons with unique mods attached. Now there will be uniques spawning in the rest of the maps, so at least players who couldn’t no-life the game to be endgame-capable can experience some loot variety in this extraction shooter.
The full patch notes for Update 1.0.6 can be found here, which has a lot more changes and additions that are not covered here.
Marathon is out now on PS5, PC (Steam) and Xbox Series X|S. Check out our review of the game here.