With Bungie’s Marathon release date not that far away, and the upcoming Server Slam that takes place on February 26, 2026, where we can all play the game for free, it seems that Bungie is getting serious about cheaters. In a new post over at the official Marathon blog, Bungie has provided a fairly lengthy update on how it feels about cheaters and what it has put in place to attempt to stop them.
There’s a lot to go over, so let me give you the cliff notes version of it all.
According to Bungie, the game runs on fully authoritative dedicated servers that control movement, shooting, actions, and inventory, which means if a client tries to do something it should not be able to do, the server simply rejects it without ruining the match for everyone else. That alone should shut down nonsense like teleporting, infinite ammo, or damage manipulation.
At the same time, Bungie created new networking systems with client-side prediction and rewind so everything still feels fast and responsive on your end, while the server tracks every single bullet with per-shot adjudication, redundant transmission, and aim compensation to make sure hits register properly even under packet loss. If you have a solid connection, you are not getting shot behind cover. It has also invested in a global data center footprint to keep latency low for players around the world. That last part is super important and very costly. It just goes to show that Bungie is not playing around.
On top of that, Marathon will implement a server-driven Fog of War system that limits what your client actually knows about the map, which helps prevent loot revealers, container peeking, wall hacks, and ESP-style cheats from exposing information you should not have. The security stack itself has been rebuilt from the ground up, layered with third-party protection such as BattlEye, plus additional proprietary systems that operate in both user mode and kernel mode. Bungie is careful about how much detail it shares because anti-cheat is an arms race, but it makes it clear this is not a one-and-done solution and it plans to keep investing in it.
The servers will constantly collect gameplay telemetry, feeding it into backend analysis tools that look for suspicious behavior patterns, so even if someone slips through in the moment, they can still get flagged and banned later after a deeper dive. And if you are in the middle of a run and lose connection, you can reconnect to your shell and keep going as long as it is not a larger server-side failure. If the issue is on Bungie’s end, it will attempt to return starting gear to impacted players, though that does not cover client-side or personal Internet issues. Anyone confirmed to be cheating is permanently banned with no second chances. It also takes the in-game economy seriously, working to protect your vault and the time you invested from duplication exploits or other economic cheats.
With Bungie making this many precautions to ensure that everyone has an enjoyable time while playing Marathon, it is to be commended. Especially since another recent extraction shooter, Arc Raiders, has had its fair share of issues due to cheaters, and the last time I played, they were still an issue.
Marathon releases on March 5, 2026, for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. We’ll be playing Marathon and covering it for review, so we’ll see you either during the Server Slam or in the full game.
Source: Marathon official blog.
