The free loadout: a unique feature of extraction shooters that allows down-on-their-luck players to get back on their feet with complimentary gear and minimal risk. Every extraction shooter has their own take on the catch-up mechanic—typically balancing the free stuff by giving you crappy guns or limited armor. Depending on your point of view, Bungie's Marathon reboot might have the most generous or restrictive free loadout of the bunch.

As detailed in a new vidoc showing off all of Marathon's runner shells (essentially hero characters), Bungie says Rook is a unique class option that functions like a free loadout. You can't bring anything in with you, but you're supplied with basic kit for free and can keep whatever you find on a raid.

That's more-or-less how the free loadout works in Arc Raiders, the most popular extraction shooter of the moment, but Bungie's implementation is different in two major ways:

1. Rook players will always enter a match late, making it harder to compete for the best loot on the map
2. Rook players can only queue solo

Depending on where you land on Arc Raiders' free loadout debate, that could be fantastic news. Some have argued for months now that free loadouts don't have enough downsides in Arc Raiders—a byproduct of even the weakest guns being plenty effective in that game—but limiting that playstyle to solo and late joins is a significant wrinkle. If the intention is to disincentivize players from constantly using free loadouts to never risk anything and still escape with the best loot, it's a good start.

That said, Marathon's Rook class also comes with a unique ability that sounds super handy: a cloak that makes enemy NPCs ignore your presence, making it easier to slip in or out of compounds unnoticed.

Similar to Escape From Tarkov's Scavs, Rooks can also be instantly identified by their appearance.

"Ultimately, Rook is a morality test," said senior designer Mike Humbolt. "You have a couple of options when you see a Rook: either you're a decent person and you drop a piece of loot and let them be on their merry way, or you're a monster and you blast them in the face."

I wonder if that scenario will actually have two outcomes in Marathon. In every extraction shooter that isn't Arc Raiders, peaceful coexistence is usually a fantasy. There's an expectation that PvP is why everyone is there, and killing only has upsides. I'll be interested to see if Bungie can, or even wants to, cultivate a "talk first, shoot second" culture in Marathon. Considering the rest of this vidoc is laser-focused on the wonders of Runner abilities in 3v3 team fights, my gut says Marathon will be a shoot-on-sight game.

Embark has yet to reveal the roadmap for Arc Raiders' next year of updates, but it has done the next best thing: vaguely allude to what's to come in an interview. That'd be a recent interview with GamesRadar+, in which design lead Virgil Watkins dished about a variety of topics, including maps.

"There are going to be multiple maps coming this year, and I think it's going to be across a spectrum of size to try to facilitate different types of gameplay," Watkins said. "So you might see some that are smaller, and you might see some that are even grander than what we've got now."

Arc Raiders' existing world map and in-game hints suggest a few of the locales we could see in 2026: a settlement closer to that intimidating volcano, and a toxic swamp. Or maybe those will just be modifiers applied to existing maps, but Watkins' main point is that Embark isn't interested in adding maps just to have new places to do the same old thing.

"The ambition is to try to pair it with some new type of experience, whether that's the map conditions or weather conditions we put in that make the play feel different, enemy types or compositions feeling different, or we're escalating the types of loot available there."

It also helps, Watkins added, when a new map coalesces around a unified theme.

"Of course adding a new map has its own novelty, and it's a new place to play and do that. But what else? Thematically, gameplay-wise. How do the enemies and the items and the experiences in that map all point toward something? It's kind of getting that thematically cohesive stuff together that feels like, 'Oh, guys, the Whatever Update just came out for Arc Raiders. Let's go check that out.'"

He gave Stella Montis as a prime example: dark, dank, and more deliriously violent than the four launch maps. That map's exploration of indoor-only gameplay and map-exclusive Arc bots gets the mind racing about what other extremes future maps could hold: a block of highrise towers connected by ziplines, a desert with underground fast travel, maybe a giant flying Arc you can enter and loot?

Watkins avoided specifics of course, but he did indicate a full roadmap would be coming "sometime soon."