Marathon director Joe Ziegler has laid out Bungie's vision for the next few seasons of Marathon. If you're looking for a statement that confronts all the doomerism around the extraction shooter's Steam numbers or a followup on Sony's writedown of the studio's value, you won't find in Ziegler's latest communiqué. What you will find is a recap of how things are going in the game itself, including some big experiments in the works. The studio's working on a new map that "leans into alien elements and mind warping debuffs," for instance, but that's still way off. The next Runner shell is a defensive kit named Sentinel. But the most interesting of the reveals are undoubtedly two planned PvE-focused modes coming next season. "We want to evolve Marathon as a whole to be an experience where you can find more novel ways to play when you're stressed out from a nail-biting run and just need to cool off or have fun without the stress. Options where you can go full sweat or lean back and chill," Ziegler wrote. To that end, look out for the following sometime in season 2: I know Destiny diehards who will be excited to hear that, especially the purely PvE mode. Marathon does really only have one mental mode (stressed the heck out), so I see potential in PvE options that let rival squads lay down their swords. But before you interpret that as Bungie waving the white flag and just making Destiny again, well, PvP is the big strength of Marathon, and Bungie wants to try new stuff in that arena as well. From the outside looking in, I'm skeptical that Marathon's existing maps will adapt nicely to a PvE format. There isn't a huge variety of UESC enemies to fight, and even the meanest boss fights in the game are balanced around squads of three. My gut says a meaningful co-op mode would take a lot of dedicated design work to get right. But this is Bungie we're talking about, so that might be exactly what it has in mind. Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best de