‘No Second Chances’ — Bungie Issues Warning to Would-Be Cheaters Ahead of Marathon Launch

Bungie has issued a warning to anything thinking of cheating in Marathon: you will be permanently banned from the game, and there are no second chances.

In a blog post, the Sony-owned studio said anyone found to be cheating in its extraction shooter will be permabanned from playing Marathon forever, “no second chances.”

However, Bungie acknowledged there may be flaws in its system, as there are in all systems, and so will have an appeals process in place to help with detection issues.

“Tau Ceti IV is a dangerous world where death is certain,” Bungie began. “That said, we want you to know your deaths are due to your own mistakes or enemy outplays — not because your run was compromised by network issues, cheaters, or the hardware hosting your connection to the world.

“No network or security model can guarantee perfection, but we are committed to protecting the Marathon competitive experience and ensuring everyone has their fair chance at exfiltrating with a backpack full of sweet loot.”

To that end, Marathon dedicated servers are “fully authoritative” on key combat and looting actions, Bungie explained, which should help prevent cheating. Meanwhile, the ‘Fog of War’ system limits the regions of a map that individual player clients have knowledge of, hopefully limiting the effectiveness of wall hacks, ESP cheats, and loot revealers “Product security is never fully solved and we’ll continue to invest in our game security systems,” Bungie stressed.

On the crucial subject of client security, Bungie said it includes both user-mode and kernel-mode components, but kept things vague — deliberately. “Game security is a never-ending arms war with bad actors,” Bungie said. “This means sharing details about methodologies for protecting our games can inform those bad actors how to defeat them. With that in mind, we hope this high-level snapshot gives you an idea of how we are addressing client security.” There is no mention of Bungie employing Secure Boot (along with TPM 2.0), which is officially required to play the latest Call of Duty games and last year’s Battlefield 6 on PC.

Marathon will launch its ‘Server Slam’ event on February 26, during which all of Bungie’s security tools will be online. Bungie called on players to report cheaters if they encounter them. Marathon launches proper on March 5 across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S.

Bungie’s blog post on security comes as fellow extraction shooter Arc Raiders is embroiled with a war on cheaters itself — and developer Embark Studios has issued some strongly-worded statements of its own.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.