Bungie shares more detail about Marathon's Symbiosis update and 2027 plans

Bungie is having a busy week. After the game studio shared its broad strategy for keeping players happy with its two main franchises, the team has gone into a little more detail about the next phase for its latest shooter, Marathon . Following on the previously announced Nightfall refresh in October, Bungie offered more insight on the new game modes coming in December and revealed that another big update is slated for March.

The team said that December's Symbiosis update will add a team deathmatch mode as well as a permanently available PvE mode. Details are still being finalized for the latter, but the goal of the PvE mode will allow people to experiment with their builds and fine-tune their skills without being attacked by other players. Bungie will also overhaul the Perimeter zone, which is the first one players see, to give it a more unique visual identity and new gameplay encounters, including a boss dubbed the Tick Queen. For the experienced players, a new shell archetype is coming. The Bishop is being billed as a "high-performance robot samurai," which certainly sounds fun. For the less experienced players, Marathon will add a social space with a firing range to help make the onboarding smoother.

Looking ahead to 2027, the March update hasn't been given a name yet, but Bungie says it will be "meaningfully larger than Symbiosis." The planned additions for that patch include "an interconnected system of permanent PvE, PvP, and PvEvP experiences," more onboarding improvements, a new zone and new alien enemies. The game will also add deeper progression to the shell system and "more focused questlines and narrative." That amounts to a pretty extensive set of changes, which Bungie says will lay a foundation for Marathon to continue growing over the course of 2027. It's a lot of big promises for a game that has already been facing a lot of scrutiny from the jump.