Bungie has confirmed what extraction shooter veterans already suspected: Marathon will wipe everything every season. Gear, contract progression, faction progression, player level. Gone. On a three-month clock, without exception.
— Marathon (@MarathonTheGame) March 3, 2026
The official language from Bungie is worth sitting with: "Everyone will start fresh each season with nothing to their name and the constant threat of death in a world more lethal and powerful than you are." That's not a soft reset. That's a hard wipe dressed up in lore. If you've spent the better part of a season farming a loadout you love, the game will delete it before the next one begins.
What you do keep is narrower than you might hope. Earned and paid cosmetics survive, as do titles, Codex progression, and Liaison contract progression, meaning you won't have to re-unlock factions from scratch each time. That's a reasonable carve-out. But the gear is gone, and so is every level you've climbed. Bungie's justification is that "seasonal resets mean that the game stays dangerous, loot feels meaningful, and there's always a good opportunity to get back into the game or bring a friend in without feeling behind the curve." That argument holds up on paper. Whether it holds up after players spend sixty hours on a build they'll never see again is a different question entirely.
What You're Actually Getting Each Season
The seasonal content itself looks genuinely substantial, which matters when you're asking people to accept a full wipe as the cost of entry. Season 1, titled Death is the First Step, runs from March to June. It tasks the community with unlocking access to the Cryo Archive, a fourth zone set aboard the derelict UESC Marathon ship in orbit above Tau Ceti. The zone features security puzzles, frozen vaults, and an enemy Bungie describes as something "even the UESC fears." Ranked mode arrives in the second half of March, with exclusive rewards tied to how high you climb each season.
Season 2, called Nightfall, runs from June to August and brings a nighttime variant of the Dire Marsh map, a new runner shell called Sentinel, new weapons, mods, and something called the Cradle system, which Bungie says will give players "more autonomy over your Runner shell's statistical strengths and weaknesses." Details on that are still thin. All seasonal updates are free, no expansions or DLC required, which is the right call for a game that already asks $39.99 at the door.
The comparison to Arc Raiders is unavoidable. That game made its wipe system, called Expeditions, optional. Bungie is going the opposite direction, treating the wipe as a feature rather than a concession. Mandatory wipes are the Escape from Tarkov orthodoxy, and Bungie is planting its flag there without apology. Whether Marathon's player base accepts that trade depends entirely on whether the seasonal content earns the reset, or just demands it. The Server Slam pulled in over nine million PvP deaths before the game even launched, so the appetite is clearly there. Keeping it fed every three months is the harder job, and it starts on March 5.
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