Marathon Opens Cryo Archive to Solo Runners With Vault Breaker

Marathon's season 2 mid-season update starts July 21, and it brings the game's first proper PvE mode, Vault Breaker, built on the Cryo Archive map. The mode runs solo, in duos, or in full crews, which means players who never assembled a crew or cleared the skill and loot bar can finally see a map that was previously locked to both.

Bungie laid out the details in a Steam blog post. In Vault Breaker, you take on a progressively challenging series of vaults and grow stronger across multiple matches through progression unique to the mode, pushing toward a final vault and the entity inside it. Queuing requires a special Sponsored Kit. Anything you pick up stays behind when you exfil, with one exception: Vault Data, a new currency found inside the vaults. Extract it and you can spend it on upgrades to your Vault Breaker Sponsored Kits and on gear usable in other modes.

"This let's you experience Cryo Archive without flooding the economy with low-risk, high-power Cryo loot."

— Bungie

The second major piece of the update is the Cradle Evolution System. Once you max out your Cradle, you can reset it to zero to earn one additional maximum Energy point and unlock cosmetics, including multiple Runner shell styles. Those cosmetics arrive later in the season regardless, so an early reset just unlocks them ahead of schedule, and they land automatically once they go live. Cradle progression speeds also go up with the change.

The rest of the mid-season update covers quality-of-life work, tuning, and the addition of player profile stats. Bungie has also dated season 3: September 22. That season revamps Perimeter with major new areas, encounters, and gameplay, and adds a new Runner shell, new weapons, equipment, and what Bungie calls surprises, the same content pattern season 2 followed.

I run a channel built around open-world games, so a structured extraction shooter like Marathon sits next to my usual beat rather than inside it, and Vault Breaker is the first addition that makes me want to actually load Cryo Archive, because a PvE entry point removes the exact wall that keeps most lapsed players out. I think the solo option matters more than the progression hook here, since the people Bungie most needs back are the ones who bounced off the moment a stranger started shooting at them.

Whether that pulls in the PvE crowd is the open question. The mode is explicitly experimental, and Bungie has framed it as a way to let players reach a high-end map without breaking the loot economy. The same caveat applies to the Cradle reset, which trades a full progression wipe for a single Energy point and some early cosmetics. Bungie says it will share a full rundown on Vault Breaker and more on season 3 closer to each live date.

Read also, Bungie confirmed the June 9 update was the final content drop for Destiny 2, ending nearly nine years of post-launch support, with the game staying playable in the way the original Destiny still is. The decision followed a 120.1 billion yen operating loss Sony tied to the studio, roughly $765 million in impairment split between Destiny 2's underperformance and Marathon's launch quarter. Marathon shipped in March on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, with Alinea Analytics estimating 1.2 million copies sold about two weeks in for $55 million before microtransactions, around 800,000 of them on Steam, and a Steam 24-hour concurrent peak that has fallen from 88,337 on launch day to 26,913. A Bloomberg report published alongside the Destiny 2 news said Bungie is planning significant layoffs and has no Destiny 3 in active development.