Marathon Beginner's Guide in 2026

Marathon Beginner's Guide Quick Summary:

• Seven Runners/Shells available at launch: Destroyer, Vandal, Recon, Assassin, Triage, Thief, Rook.
• Four abilities for each Shell: Prime (Ultimate), Tactical, and two passive Traits.
• Unique customization systems in the form of Cores and Implants. They allow you to modify your Shell’s abilities and stats.
• You can install up to 4 mods on your guns, with 8 attachment slots: barrel, generator, muzzle, grip, chip, magazine, optics, and shield.
• Three maps available at launch: Perimeter, filled with leftover data. Dire Marsh is a vast open marshland with limited visibility. Outpost, an ex-spaceport full of many secrets.
• Fourth map, Crio Archive, is coming in season 1 and will be a raid-like endgame activity.

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Marathon Runners Explained

Runners, or Shells, as the devs changed the name to avoid sounding too heroshooter-y, are hired contractors for one of the six factions, which we’ll cover later. They are not real humans but literal bio-shells. In simple terms, you’re not playing as them as much as you’re possessing the body, kinda like a ghost in the machine. You can freely change between them outside raids. There are 7 shells in Marathon:

1. Destroyer: Brawn and muscle. Basically, a Tank that has the ability to launch missiles and create a shield to cover your party from projectiles.
2. Vandal: Nimble and agile. This shell is all about the movement, so if you come from something like Apex, this Shell will feel like Octane.
3. Recon: Data and intel. The information you gather on the battlefield is your weapon. All your abilities support that. You can locate nearby hostiles, know when you’re being tracked, and track your target. You’re the hunter, they’re prey.
4. Assassin: Smoke and mirrors. The less your opponent knows about you, the better. Create smoke screens, become invisible, and attack when the opponent least expects you.
5. Triage: Healing and support. Doing the dirty work of aiding your teammates after their gung-ho entrance didn’t go well. You can revive and heal crew members, but don’t think this is it. You can stun your enemies with EMP blasts by overcharging your weapons.
6. Thief: Loot and scoot. This Shell will be the source of many players' anger. Steal the highest value loot from their inventory and then run away using your grapple device.
7. Rook: Clean slate. Drop in with a starter kit, loot everything you can, and walk out. You can blend in with UESC operatives so they will not attack you.

Each Shell has 4 abilities.

• Prime Ability, which is your ultimate.
• Tactical Ability, which is the core utility your Shell will use the most. 
• Two Traits, which are kinda like passives and are innate to your character. 

The abilities require spending Heat. Heat is your stamina gauge, which you spend on skills and movement. Spending too much of it will cause Shell to overheat, severely limiting your options and quickly leading to your death, so be sure to manage it well! 

Learning how to play with the Shell you like the most is essential, as your aiming skill isn’t the only thing that will separate you from other players. Tactical thinking, resource management, and teamwork are all key.

How to Use Cores and Implants in Marathon

Marathon is not just another extraction shooter. It pushes the formula even further than ARC Raiders did. It does it with a unique thing that’s absent in other games of the genre: Cores & Implants. Both can have rarity levels, ranging from something that changes your ability just a little to something that makes you play like a completely different character. So what are they? Putting it bluntly:

• Cores: Change the way your Shell plays. Changes their skills and the effects they have. Cores are Shell-specific, but there are some generic ones too.
• Implants: Stat boosts with passive effects, treat them like armor or jewelry in RPGs.

By making Shells have their own abilities and adding the option to modify them to your taste, Marathon pushes into the RPG territory, creating space for buildcrafting and new, unusual approaches to the situations. Until the meta is established, you never know what to expect from your opponent. But wait, you might say, we have stats in this game? Yes, we do.

Runner Stats

Each Shell has its own stat block, consisting of 13 base stats. Understanding how each of them influences your Shell and what strengths and weaknesses it has by proxy means knowing how to act in every situation you end up in. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory, but some might raise questions. Let me explain how the Runner stats work in Marathon:

Stat	What it Does
Heat Capacity	As mentioned before, Heat is your stamina. Having a bigger capacity means having more space for options and mistakes
Agility	Increases movement speed & jump height
Loot Speed	How fast you loot the crates
Melee Damage	Self explanatory
Prime Recovery	Influences how fast the Prime recovers
Tactical Recovery	Same, but for Tactical Ability
Self-Repair Speed	Influences how fast you recover health and shield meters
Finisher Siphon	Influences the amount of shield you restore after performing a finisher on another Shell
Revive Speed	How fast you can revive, and how fast you will be revived
Hardware	Reduces the duration of physical status effects
Firewall	Reduces the duration of electronic status effects, such as Triage’s EMP
Fall Resistance	How much damage the Shell takes when falling from height
Ping Duration	How long your ping lasts for other crew members. Yes, there’s a stat for that

You’re not stuck with default values. As I said before, installing implants raises the stats, and you can influence if you want to min-max and play a narrow specialist, or even the stats out to mitigate the downsides of your Shell. The name of the game in Marathon is customization and building the way you want to play.

 

 

Marathon Weapons and Modifications

Marathon, developed by the Halo and Destiny 2 teams, obviously has a strong focus on weapons and their customization. We will have 28 weapons available at launch, and all the weapons are split into 7 categories:

• Pistols
• ARs
• Marksman Rifles
• Snipers
• Railguns
• LMGs
• SMGs

Weapons utilize various ammo types, like Light Rounds, Heavy Rounds, Volt Cells and Batteries, and MIPS rounds for something like shotguns or sniper rifles. Not only that, but your weapons also support modifications. These gun modifications can turn the worst gun into a killing machine or a utility tool, but more than that, they influence the rarity of your gun. This way, if you attach a Prestige mod to your Common weapon, it’ll become a Prestige rarity as well. The attachments that are available in this game are on par with more serious mil-sims in terms of quantity. These are all the attachment slots:

• Barrel
• Generator
• Grip
• Magazine
• Muzzle
• Optics
• Shield
• Chip

You can only have 4 of them installed on your gun at once. Some mods, mostly Chip, change the way you use your weapon. For instance, a golden Chip mod for one of the pistols makes you invisible after you kill an enemy with it. Now, how many mods are there, you may ask? Well, according to developers, the game launches with over 400 weapon mods. Do you feel it yet? Under the deceptively attractive AAA sheen is a build crafting monster you’ll spend hundreds of hours mastering. Idk about you, but that makes me excited.

All Marathon Factions Breakdown

Alright, so Marathon is the reimagination of an old franchise made by the same devs back in the 90s. It’s a pre-established world with its own factions that shape it. Most of these factions are, well, cults. None of them is good, btw, so get used to being an errand Shell. Factions are a local progression system, as they give you Contracts that you need to complete in order to progress in the game. Factions have 6 levels to complete, with the final one opening a faction-unique store that sells unique Prestige items. There are 6 factions total. Let me explain each Marathon faction in short:

• Arachne: Death Cult. Blood, gore, all that fun stuff. Your edgelord faction. Centered around aggressive PvP. The contracts and their rewards will likely center around killing more efficiently.
• CyberAcme: Probably the least pronounced faction. They’re not specializing in anything in particular, but provide some pleasant QoL boosts like a bigger inventory size, which you’ll really need, trust me.
• NuCaloric: Big Pharma x1000. In their own words, centered on the survival of humanity. They provide Mobility buffs. And hey, what can be better for survival than avoiding combat?
• Sekiguchi/SekGen: Biomodding. Transhumanism. Other words that mean “evil corporation experimenting on people”. You, in particular. This faction is centered around survival. Recovery, higher health, etc. The contracts are mostly about retrieving shady documents, data, and old technologies.
• Traxus: Biggest corp in the lore. Their contracts center on retrieving high-end weapons and cores. If you want to feel like a cog in an eons-old machine, this faction is for you.
• MIDA: Local anarchists and revolutionaries. They’re anti-corpo faction, your Johnny Silverhands. But don’t be tricked by their facade. They don’t value you one bit. You’re a pawn on their chessboard, and they will utilize you for a “greater cause.” By the looks of it, their contracts will be about sabotaging and destroying something other factions value.

I will talk more about factions in a future, more detailed guide, but there’s one important thing to note for now. Factions give constant stat boosts. These stat boosts will not reset with wipes, which are also present in Marathon and will happen every 3 months.

 

 

Marathon Maps Overview

No extraction shooter can exist without good map design. You’ll be spending countless hours on them. At launch, there will be 3 available, with a fourth coming in season 1. All maps are part of the Tau Ceti IV planet. We don’t know much about them yet, but you can be sure I’ll cover them in excruciating detail once I play enough. So far, these are all Marathon maps:

• Perimeter: Seems like a failed terraforming effort. This map is rich with data, full of shady research by corporations.
• Dire Marsh: Located in the colony’s former agricultural zone. Big open areas and limited visibility due to the marshland environment.
• Outpost: Something like a spaceport. You’ll likely find lots of space tech and weapons lying around on this map.

Maps will also feature specific Map Events that offer good loot but will be high-intensity due to many players wanting to take part. You can either take an active part in it or ambush the players who finish the event. Something tells me it’s not going to be a very friendly PvPvE game, unlike ARC Raiders.

The fourth map coming is called Cryo Archive, and it’s a part of a titular Marathon spaceship. From what we know, it features raid-like mechanics, contains lots of enemies, and is basically high risk high reward location. The developers position it as an ultimate endgame map, so make sure to prepare well. Knowing raids in Destiny 2, this will be far from a cakewalk even without hostile players.

Read our other Marathon guides:

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