Bungie’s extraction shooter is about to hit its first full seasonal reset with Marathon Season 2: Nightfall. Here is exactly what gets wiped, what carries over, and why Bungie’s approach is more approachable than Escape From Tarkov’s harsher model.
Marathon is heading into its first real turning point. Season 2, titled Nightfall, lands on June 2, and it is bringing the game’s first full seasonal reset along with a new zone, new gear and a reworked progression flow.
For an extraction shooter, the way a game handles wipes is as important as its gunplay. Bungie is using Nightfall to lock in how Marathon will live and breathe over time: what you lose, what you keep, and how that seasonal churn is supposed to feel compared to genre leaders like Escape From Tarkov.
Below is a clear breakdown of every major system, how it behaves between seasons, and why Bungie’s take should feel more approachable than some of its competitors.
When Season 2 Arrives And What It Adds
Season 2: Nightfall launches on June 2. An end-of-season patch, Update 1.0.9, hits earlier on May 19 to ramp up rewards and chaos before the reset.
Nightfall’s headline additions are a new Night Marsh zone, fresh weapons, a new Runner shell, and a new stat customization framework called The Cradle. Faction progression is being sped up, and Bungie is layering in a collection of quality-of-life changes based on Season 1 feedback.
Leading into the wipe, Bungie is essentially flipping Marathon into a high-yield mode. Locked-room keys will always drop from Wardens, high-value events like Intercept, Lockdown, Convoy, Warden spawns and Anomaly are guaranteed every run, and UESC enemies are becoming more aggressive across Tau Ceti IV with new Warden encounters, more dropship activity and a fresh threat appearing in Dire Marsh and Perimeter.
The Cryo Archive activity also gets its own mini-season. From May 21 to June 2, it is available daily with a free Sponsored Kit awarded each day just for logging in. A Ranked variant of Cryo Archive runs from May 24 to 28 with stricter entry requirements and higher stakes, built to serve as a last big test of squads before the slate is wiped.
The Seasonal Wipe: What Fully Resets
Bungie is clear that Nightfall is Marathon’s first full seasonal reset, meant to level the playing field and keep early adopters from snowballing far beyond new players.
The following progress and items are wiped at the start of Season 2:
Runner progression:
Your Runner level is reset. Any stat growth or unlocks tied directly to that leveling track are cleared. The same applies to your Ranked level, so every player re-enters competitive play from a fresh starting band each season.
Faction systems:
Season 1’s faction progression and upgrades are wiped. If you had sunk time into a particular faction’s bonuses, those specific power spikes will not carry forward. Bungie wants each season’s faction metagame to restart so the best strategies can shift and new players are not stuck chasing several months of backlog.
Currencies and inventories:
Most currencies are reset when Nightfall begins. Your inventory, vault and mailbox are all cleared out. Any weapons, armor pieces, consumables or extraction haul you were sitting on at the end of Season 1 are gone once Season 2 starts.
The same goes for a large chunk of contracts and schema unlocks. Those mission-style tasks and their associated unlock tracks are designed to be seasonal milestones, so they do not persist across the wipe.
In practice, that means the tangible power and economic advantages you built in Season 1 are temporary. You are expected to re-earn your kit, rebuild your stash and climb back through the game’s economic ladder each season.
What Carries Over Into Season 2
Despite going for a hard reset on power, Bungie is not deleting everything. The studio has carved out a permanent layer that rides above the seasonal grind.
Here is what does persist into Nightfall and beyond:
Cosmetics and identity:
All your cosmetics carry forward. Skins, visual customization pieces and aesthetic unlocks you earned or purchased in Season 1 remain available in Season 2. Bungie wants your identity as a Runner to survive the wipe, even while your gear and power reset underneath.
Weapon unlocks:
Any weapon unlocks you already redeemed stay unlocked across seasons. While you will lose the specific copies of guns in your stash, the underlying access to those weapons returns in Season 2. That cuts down on the feeling of losing everything and makes the early-game arsenal more varied for returning players.
Codex-style progression:
Most Codex challenge progress also persists. These longer-term objectives behave more like permanent account goals than seasonal chores, and they give you a sense of ongoing mastery that does not evaporate every few months.
Account-wide access and passes:
Your faction access unlocks carry over, so you do not have to re-open basic access routes to different factions each season, only rebuild their seasonal progress.
The Rewards Pass is also persistent between seasons as far as progress goes, letting you keep chipping away at its track instead of having its bar completely stripped. That is a significant difference from many battle passes that simply expire at reset.
Premium currencies:
Your balances of premium currencies LUX and SILK are safe. These do not get touched by the wipe, keeping any real-money investment intact and letting you spend at your own pace without worrying that a seasonal turnover will erase your wallet.
Ranked Progress And Seasonal Titles
Ranked is treated as a fully seasonal ladder. Your Ranked level is reset at the start of Nightfall, but Bungie softens that blow by paying out rewards based on your highest rank reached in Season 1.
Cosmetic prizes and Ranked titles are granted at the end of the season. Those titles then persist for one additional season, but you need to re-earn them if you want to keep them beyond that. The idea is to celebrate what you achieved without permanently locking in a status that could discourage newer players from competing.
Evolving The Extraction Structure With Nightfall
The structure around the wipe is changing too. Nightfall’s biggest systemic addition is The Cradle, a new stat customization system tied to your Runner shell.
Instead of relying purely on random loot and faction upgrades to shape your character, The Cradle lets you deliberately tune your shell’s stats. That kind of granular control is important in an extraction shooter, since it can determine how much risk you are willing to take in a raid and how your build plays when everything is on the line.
Bungie is also using Season 2 to push the game’s risk-reward curve. Faction progression is being accelerated, so it should take less time to feel powerful in a new season. At the same time, the developers are increasing world activity density: more map events, more UESC military presence, and additional Warden scenarios make each run more dynamic and lucrative. That mixture is meant to make the climb back from zero feel exciting instead of exhausting.
On the frustration side, certain pain points are being smoothed. Rook’s Signal Mask ability is getting a notable buff, with a longer duration while sprinting and reduced AI footstep detection range, which gives stealth players more agency when they are under-geared after a fresh wipe.
Key Templates are also shifting from Fragile to Compromised, so they no longer permanently vanish when you are downed. Deluxe keys can now drop from wall safes too, making high-value routes a bit more accessible. These tweaks all point toward a seasonal structure that respects player time and lets them take meaningful risks more often.
How Marathon’s Wipe Philosophy Compares To Escape From Tarkov
In the extraction space, Escape From Tarkov is the reference point for seasonal wipes. Tarkov’s approach is stark. On a wipe, you lose almost everything: stash, character progression, traders, quest chains and the in-game economy reset. You keep intangible knowledge and maybe a few global account perks, but the game is built around the idea that nothing material survives long term.
Marathon’s Nightfall model shares the same general goal of refreshing the playing field, but it is noticeably more forgiving and structured around long-term account identity.
The biggest contrasts are:
Tarkov treats the entire progression loop as temporary. Battle-state leans into the brutal climb as something that must be entirely redone every wipe. In Marathon, Bungie draws a harder line between short-term seasonal power and long-term account investment. Cosmetics, weapon unlock access, Codex progress, Rewards Pass progress and premium currencies all persist, which means you are building a stable layer of progression that survives each reset.
Tarkov gatekeeps a lot of gear and meta options behind reset-sensitive traders and quests. When a wipe hits, even veteran players are forced back into a slow unlock process. Marathon side-steps some of that by letting weapon unlocks and certain access layers remain open, making the early weeks of a new season less restrictive for returning players.
Tarkov’s wipes are also relatively hard edges in terms of onboarding. New players who join late in a cycle can feel overwhelmed by a hyper-established economy and high-end kits, even if everyone will reset eventually. Bungie’s stated goal with Nightfall is more explicitly about approachability. Faster faction progression, boosted event frequency, and safer key mechanics make jumping in at the start of Season 2 less punishing and give late-Season 1 players a high-reward sendoff.
The trade-off is that Marathon’s seasonal reset might feel less absolutely fresh to hardcore players who enjoy Tarkov’s full zero-to-hero purge. But for most players, the ability to retain identity, important unlocks and premium currency balances strikes a friendlier balance between stakes and respect for time.
Is Bungie’s Reset System Good For The Game?
As an extraction shooter, Marathon needs tension. Losing your loadout and watching your stash evaporate adds weight to every decision you make. But it also needs a stable backbone so that each new season does not feel like getting dumped back into a tutorial.
Nightfall’s wipe plan threads that needle reasonably well. By deleting immediate power while preserving cosmetics, key weapon unlocks, Codex progress, pass progress and currency, Bungie gives players a clear reason to care about long-term play without undercutting the core thrill of betting your gear in every run.
Whether that is enough will depend on how impactful The Cradle, the new zone and the updated faction systems feel in moment-to-moment play. Compared directly to Escape From Tarkov’s harsher seasonal structure though, Marathon’s approach is noticeably more approachable. It invites players to commit for the long haul, knowing that some of what they build today will still matter when the next wipe hits.