At the time of writing, Marathon is about 24 hours from officially releasing. We know, thanks to yesterday’s post, that Season 1 goes live right as the game goes live, too, alongside other details. Yet, to keep players learning and engaging with the game, Bungie is releasing maps in the first few weeks of launch to help them gear up and build before tackling the harder maps.
How to unlock Outpost and Cryo Archive in Marathon
Although you won’t really need to wait too long, as Outpost is launching the day after launch. You can check the release time for Marathon if you need it. Though you will need to unlock it first. To do so, you need to get to level 12 on your account, which will then allow you to queue into Outpost, one of the maps locked away from Server Slam. This map aims to be hard, which is why they’ve blocked the map off from testing and making you get to level 12. At least so you have some gear to risk going into the map with.
The other map, which is delayed till the second half of March, is Cryo Archive. This is an end-game map, which Bungie wants players with high-tier loot going into. The map typically requires a key to enter, which we’ve learned you can get from Lockdown events. Hence why you need good gear, as the process of acquiring a Cryo key is pretty difficult.
In addition, to unlock the Cryo Archive map, it’s part of the Season 1 community challenge event, where players get points to eventually unlock the season map. The map will likely be part of the major Ranked grind that players want to do to get exclusive rewards and climb the leaderboards for Ranked mode, and Cryo and Outpost will certainly have their role in extracting high-value loot from those maps.
The news comes from Bungie’s update the day before launch. The post first arrived on X, but it will get mirrored onto Bungie’s Discord and website at some point.
Last Updated On: Mar 4, 2026 6:16 pm CET