Bungie is testing a duos mode in Marathon starting March 18

Bungie has announced a limited-time duos mode for Marathon. Game director Joe Ziegler shared the news on X/Twitter, confirming that the duos queue will go live on March 18 at 10am PT.

"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 plays with crews of 2 at a wider scale."

This is explicitly an experiment, not a finished feature. The test is expected to run for about two weeks, though Ziegler noted that the timeline could shift depending on how things go.

The mode is restricted to the Perimeter map and won't include open matchmaking – players need to bring their own partner and manually select "Perimeter - Duo" from the zone list.

"This likely won't be the final implementation of how it would look and flow in the game, but for now it was [the] easiest way for us to get it to you all to help us test. We're excited to run this experiment with you all. Pending what we learn, we're hoping to expand duos as a queue in the future and we wanted to take this first step sooner than later so we could understand how it affects our game better before investing a lot more time in fleshing out the feature."

The arrival of this mode makes more sense with some context. Bungie originally designed Marathon as a strictly 3v3 experience. A solo mode was never part of the original plan and was only added late in development in response to player feedback from public tests.

That's a big reason why the solo experience felt unbalanced at launch. Duos finds itself in a similar position – it exists as a working prototype that the team decided to push out for broader testing rather than wait until it's fully polished.