Marathon Season 2 is just around the corner, and Bungie has given us our first visual idea of what the next few months on Tau Ceti IV will look like with a new cinematic trailer. It features Nightfall, Dire Marsh’s new map that will allow players to embrace their inner night owl as they journey through the extraction shooter’s deadliest map in the dark. I can’t wait. I’m not ready.
Nightfall is just one of the many changes to come Marathon when season 2 will go live on June 2, but it will probably be the most important. Bungie’s latest shooter involves constantly scanning the environment for new information and possible threats. While many players now know Dire Marsh like the back of their hand, relying on flashlights in complete darkness will shake up everything about how fans interact with the map.
This will also give Bungie’s excellent sound design new opportunities to scare everyone. I long to hear footsteps splashing in the swamp and I have no idea where they come from until I die.
Okay, but that’s only half the story. As the cinematic trailer suggests, Marathon It looks like it’s about to have a whole new type of enemy threat on the map. The shadow faced by a team of runners towards the end of the clip looks like a cross between a Xenomorph and a Slender Man. Unless the trailer takes a lot of artistic license, Nightfall almost looks like it could shoot Marathon in a PVPVE horror game.
Players are already speculating about what this new enemy threat could be. The obvious hypothesis is some sort of zombie runner. “Discover the story entries for ‘Class B abnormal material”, one person wrote in the YouTube comments. “I think we get Mimics (from our riders) at night on Dire Marsh! Either that or the fungal zombies from the M2 concept art. Player theories have a habit of being more fun than reality, but I’m now convinced that Bungie is cooking up something more exciting than its early previews of Season 2 indicated.