Marathon Season 3 Release Date: 22 September, and What Bungie Has Actually Confirmed

Bungie released Update 1.1.5 on July 21, 2026 with a PvE test called Vault Breaker, which closed on August 18 after an extension from the original August 4 end date. The test was a data-gathering step for the PvE mode planned for Season 3. Here is what Bungie has confirmed for the next season, what remains uncertain, and what the completed Vault Breaker test established.

Bungie has confirmed Season 3 begins on September 22, 2026 and will bring the game’s first permanent PvE mode, built directly from feedback Bungie collected during the Vault Breaker test. Alongside that, the season revamps Perimeter — the starting map every new Runner learns on — with new areas and encounters, adds a new Runner shell, and drops fresh weapons and gear.

What Bungie hasn’t said is almost as important. There’s no confirmation on whether the full PvE mode ships on day one of Season 3 or arrives mid-season the way Vault Breaker did in Season 2, and the studio hasn’t detailed the new shell or named a single weapon. Treat anything beyond dates and the four confirmed pillars as a placeholder until Bungie’s next blog post.

Vault Breaker was Marathon‘s first experimental PvE mode, playable solo, duo, or trio through increasingly difficult vaults in the Cryo Archive. Equipment found during a Vault Breaker run could not be extracted; only event currency and designated rewards left the activity.

What Expired When the Event Ended

Tier 1 and Tier 2 Vault Data, unclaimed Armory purchases, and unfinished time-limited Codex challenges stopped being actionable when Vault Breaker closed. Bungie has not promised that missed cosmetics will return.

What Carried Over

Items purchased with Vault Data before the deadline carried into standard Marathon activities. Cradle Evolution, introduced in the same update, is a permanent system, so progress banked there survived the event. The Vault Data farming guide remains useful as a record of how the test economy worked, but its farming advice is no longer actionable while the event is closed.

Season 3 rides in on the back of Season 2 and, per Bungie’s own Key Dates post, players can expect a revamp of Perimeter, the first map anyone plays. As it stands, it’s a comparatively safe map, but that will likely change when Season 3 lands, with Bungie planning to add major new areas, encounters, and gameplay elements. Beyond the map, Season 3 brings with it a new Runner shell as well as new weapons and gear, and “lots of other content and surprises.”

The Loadout-Limited cap that shipped with 1.1.5 is sticking around as the new normal heading into Season 3, not a Vault Breaker-only rule. Six items are capped at two per infil combined, and a Crew Error blocks the run if a squad tries to stack more:

• Bubble Shield
• Chem Grenade
• EMP Grenade
• Flechette Grenade
• Frag Grenade
• Heat Grenade

Ganglion barters also picked up a hard stock limit of 3 per item (Hyphatic Gel excepted), some costs now fold in Rubber Salvage, and the reroll exploit players had been abusing to farm cheap rerolls is patched out.

Most of what circulates about Season 3 right now is not from Bungie. A closed playtest under NDA leaked, and its contents get repeated without the label. The split below is the useful part: the top half is what the studio has said, the bottom half is what leaked and could still change or never ship.

The line that matters for planning: Bungie has confirmed that a full PvE mode lands in Season 3, and has not said when inside the season. Everything describing how that mode plays — run structure, bosses, boosts — is playtest material, and a playtest is a build the studio was willing to change.

Bungie’s own coverage of Vault Breaker frames it plainly as gathering data ahead of the full system, and that’s exactly the kind of phrasing that should make you cautious about assuming Season 3’s PvE mode will look identical to what was live during the test. A time-limited test with unique Sponsored Kits and no gear extraction is a fundamentally different design space than a permanent mode sitting alongside standard extraction runs.

• Day one or mid-season? Coverage agrees the PvE mode is coming in Season 3, but not when inside the season it actually unlocks.
• Same Sponsored Kits? Whether the permanent mode keeps Vault Breaker’s kit system or replaces it with standard loadouts hasn’t been detailed.
• Do the missed cosmetics return? Codex rewards tied to the closed test window may or may not reopen once Season 3’s version ships.
• What’s in “other content and surprises”? Bungie’s own phrasing for the rest of the season is deliberately vague.

It is tempting to treat the completed test as an exact preview of Season 3. That is the wrong read. Vault Breaker removed standard loot rules — no gear survived exfil except Vault Data — which worked for a limited experiment but may not describe the permanent mode planned alongside Marathon‘s core extraction loop.

That hotfix increased critical damage against UESC and reduced UESC aggression and accuracy for solo players. The adjustment shows how quickly Bungie iterated during Vault Breaker; it should not be treated as confirmation that Season 3 will reuse the exact same tuning or Sponsored Kit rules.

Vault Breaker has ended, so its currency, Armory purchases, and time-limited challenges are no longer actionable. During the event, Commander kills were the safest Tier 1 source because the payout did not require an exfil, while consecutive Vault clears and a successful exfil were required for Tier 2. That strategy is now historical context rather than a current checklist.

If Bungie brings the activity back, verify the live reward table and deadline before following old farming routes; event currencies and weekly stock limits may change between versions.

Sources and Confidence

Separated by who actually said it, because that distinction is the whole value of this page.

One honest caveat about our own citation. Bungie’s site renders entirely in the browser, so the Key Dates post cannot be fetched and quoted by an automated check — the address above is the studio’s and carries that title, but the wording in this article was taken when the post was read, not re-verified line by line today.

Checked 4 September 2026.

Vault Breaker is over. For Season 3, the confirmed pillars — the Perimeter revamp, a new Runner shell, new gear, and a permanent PvE mode — are worth planning around, but the exact form and launch timing of that PvE mode remain unconfirmed.