Bungie has revealed their security and networking policies for Marathon, and they’ve drawn a clear line at the start.
They outlined their policy as so:
We are taking a strong stance against cheating and anyone found to be cheating or developing cheats will be permanently banned from playing Marathon forever, no second chances.
That said, no system is perfect so we will have an appeals system to monitor for any issues in detection.
This is a stricter policy than is the norm for live service games. In contrast, both Call of Duty and Fortnite have policies for temporary bans and lower penalties.
Bungie may be extra cautious to mitigate any more potential controversy or reputational damage from such controversies. This is only one aspect that could be a potential failure point, and its clear they’ve invested to curtail it.
Bungie also revealed Marathon will be using Battleye, but they also have their own anti-cheat systems on top of it. We’ll see if it will live up to the challenge when it goes live next week.