Destiny, a video game in which players travel through space wondering why the hell they can’t get new artifacts, has a brand new quest that might be the most complicated thing we’ve seen in the game to date. It involves completing the new raid, finding a whole bunch of secrets and… converting binary numbers to decimals. Destiny!
Players first started piecing together this quest over the weekend, when they discovered that Rise of Iron’s new raid had a chest nobody could open. Secret-hunters quickly figured out that the key to accessing this chest lay in five monitors, spread all throughout the raid, that could each unlock one of the laser beams that blocked entrance to the chest area. The problem was, nobody could figure out how to reach the fifth monitor.
On Wednesday, thanks to a Bungie-provided alternate reality game (ARG) and a whole bunch of maths geniuses, players finally solved the quest. Datto, a longtime Destiny YouTuber, streamed himself and his team getting the exotic pulse rifle Outbreak Prime last night. (It’s really good.) Here’s the video version:
Redditor jmpherso summed up the whole experience well in this post: In short, Destiny’s secret-hunters had to build scripts that would collect and translate a ton of data, then convert that data into image files. Once they’d pieced together the image, they figured out that it was a map of a room deep in the raid, and, well, I’ll let jmpherso explain:
What the image means/The monitors : So, the image was obviously the cylinder room with the big pyramid. After stepping on the shown cylinders (the ones “filled in”), a loud noise occured, and some users quickly found that the monitors in the previous “server farm” room could be activated. When activated they would flash some binary. At this point, Datto and co. tweeted/logged on Twitch, having already figured out the monitors and gave the information out to viewers. As it turns out, one monitor (the one with SIVA on the wall behind it) is the “column” monitor, and you need to translate the binary into a decimal digit (ex: 0010 -> 2), and the other monitor is a “row” monitor. These correspond to positions in the cylinder room, and it’s pretty much just a game. First time you activate both monitors, someone has to jump on the correct cylinder in the “0” sector in the room, then the monitor flashes to a new number, and someone needs to jump on the correct cylinder in the “1” sector. After doing 4 jumps, the pyramid opens, and you get an Exotic Engram, the Emblem, and access to the last monitor.
Still with me? Once you activate that last monitor, you can find the hidden chest, which lets you unlock Rise of Iron’s fourth and final exotic weapon quest. This post is a good walkthrough of how to do it. You and your raid group need to stand on specific canisters in the diamond room, activate some monitors, run some numbers through a binary hex converter, then go get the hidden chest.
That’s just the start. Once you get the quest, you’ll have to go through a series of even more convoluted steps involving SIVA engines, puzzles and boss fights. You’ll also have to do a bunch of things with a fireteam comprised of a Warlock, Titan and Hunter. It’s ridiculous.
It’s one of the wildest quests we’ve seen in Destiny so far. Here’s the full walkthrough if you want to try it for yourself.
Comments
16 responses to “Destiny Players Solve Ridiculously Complicated Secret Weapon Quest”
That’s pretty cool. Now lets see Blizzard do something similar with WoW and watch the community go crazy with complaints about “time gating” and having to solve something outside the game to get epix.
Already happened. Was a widespread quest in Legion that spawned a worldboss that needed 10 items clicked in order, or something like that. One of them was both horde and alliance, in a contested area, and on a long(ish) spawn timer. So became a spamfest as everyone was trying to click it.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/09/witness-world-of-warcraft-legions-amazing-steam-death-cave-before-its-gone/
What some people will go through for a rare mount…
Yeah, I read about that here already but a mount is completely optional. Lets see Blizzard do that with extra loot from a raid. Once the community figures it out then everyone who gets that far can unlock the loot.
I’d enjoy it more for the storm of complaints though.
Yeah, just saying there are similarities.
I played EQ back in the day, and there were some crazy arse requirements to get keyed for some areas – Vex Thal had you going all over the place to gather stuff, and Plane of Time had you figuring an entire expansion to get keyed. Presented right, its a highlight of the game (PoTime), presented wrong, its something for the fanatics (Vex Thal, sorta, though the drops made it fun once in there).
I havent played Destiny for a good while, and my memories of whats good and OK are hazy – never really reached any heights. Is the prize with this one so awesome that its going to be a must have for the serious player, or is it just swag?
No idea for Destiny, I’ve never played the game.
I’m currently getting back into WoW though and would love to see some more hardcore elements introduced. Whether its attunement for raids or just some crazy long winded quest saga that requires high level play for completion and gets you a one of a kind mount, anything like that would be fun. I like challenges and getting rewarded for it…WoW has gone down the path of opening up accessibility to everyone though which dumbs things down a bit too much for my liking.
You can make it accessible to all and still make them work for it.
Definitely. EQ had a lot of that, and for the most part, assuming you could do it, it was fun content.
It had the best raid setup I’ve seen in a game, with raid areas being progressively harder, while there always being something for a guild to do to progress. That side of it is why a lot of old players still talk about the game so fondly. The downside was that you needed a guild to do it, not a pug.
Maybe it was TOO hard to do certain things as the game progressed, but not by much. Theres a lot in that game that other MMO’s could learn from, and the sort of thing you’re talking about is one of them.
The epic quests in EQ were generally pretty complicated, and rewarding. The prize was generally a best in slot item, and while the game naturally moved on as expansions happened, there were often reasons to keep using them instead of better stat stuff.
My classes epic (bard, so singing steel sword) gave a buff to every spell/song class, which was huge when buffing. Wasnt repeated in anything else until they brought a better epic, so was kept well beyond when other weapons should have replaced it for stat purposes.
That sort of thing is missing from most MMO’s, and its a shame. Its a reward that lets you stand out from the crowd in a relevant way, but something everyone can aspire to,
The cleric epic had a clickable 96% resurrection spell. It was a standard cleric spell, but having no mana cost was a big deal, especially as it meant that a cleric with no mana could resurrect other people as soon as being resurrected. This played a big part in the raid which eventually killed the Sleeper on the PVP servers.
The problem with EQ was that the game was balanced in such a way that the classes that were critical for group play were largely useless solo, while the classes that could solo well were not really critical to have in a group. A cleric (or a warrior) with no group was very difficult to play effectively. In high-end zones, if a warrior tried to solo a typical MOB they would be dead in ten seconds. A cleric would be spamming fast heals on the warrior waiting for a slow spell to stick, and if the warrior died the group would usually wipe.
The balancing issues IMO broke Everquest eventually, but the raids really were something special.
At one point after it went F2P I went back to the game briefly but logged out instantly as F2P players could not use AA, and a high-end cleric with no AA is absolutely frigging useless in EQ. Can’t solo and can’t heal well enough for a group.
Yeah, fully agree. As a bard, I was able to do a lot, and do it pretty well, so was lucky that I was on the good side of the balance ledger.
But your point with the cleric epic is what I was getting at. It was a badge to get it in the first place, and its usefullness stayed there well after the stats on it became redundant. That battlerez option was a raid saver for us more than once.
And you’re spot on that there was balance issues. For me, thats what made the game so good though – you didnt just have carbon copies across each class, they all had their benefits.
The downside is that in general, you needed a group. I guess because it was one of the first MMO’s it didnt have anything to go by, so got that bit a little wrong, but it certainly gave me some of my best gaming memories as a result.
Just think that there was a lot that they got right though, and other games could learn from it. Raids and epics would be at the top of that pile, but not far behind would be the various areas needing complicated keying just to get in.
More of the original Naxxramas in WoW. That was both hard to get into, and hard to crack once there. It was an achievement to say you had that on farm status back in the day.
With the artifacts in WoW, they have a chance to do something similar.
Shit like this makes me barf. Too much convoluted shit that takes you out of the game to complete.
I guess it would make a difference if the quest item was something really powerful or just something that is cool to have but doesn’t affect game balance.
why? everything you need to do is in the game, and it all makes sense from a lore point of view, the idea I never get this gun miffs me a little but this games these days need more things like this, something that bullets wont solve. In the old days we used to have to use our brains to play.
That said the whole quest thing in which all three people all have to have the item and it needs to be the trinity of class types working together for ages, is so flawed, it really screws every casual out of getting this weapon. if only it had matchmaking… once again Bungie goes out of its way to make teamwork a thing, but doesnt give us the tools to come together as a team.
I just see stuff like this and go man… I’m never going to get that gun… 🙁
As a casual gamer I have just got to get use to the idea that I will never have this gun. Its implausible for a pick up raid to work that well to solve the puzzle in game, though it is in theory very simple. but that quest after it is just so flawed and impractical in so many ways.
Though it always impresses that some gamers have the time and passion to solve such a thing. Well played gang.
I plan on doing this quest, but it’s a little ridiculous.
The binary and puzzles actually aren’t that bad, literally just have a web page with binary 0 to 5 open. See what the monitors spit out, compare it to the web page, and tell your raid group “go stand there”. For the SIVA engine puzzle, the first two have fixed solutions that people have made available, and for the third some bright spark on r/DestinyTheGame has made a compiler where you just input your puzzles and it solves it for you.
It’s the Hunter-Warlock-Titan requirement that’s stupid. Sure, require players to do the activities. Sure, require them to be in a fireteam. But not everyone uses a different class. Of my three main Destiny friends, we have two Titan mains and a Warlock. Now either I have to power level my Hunter so we can do this, or we split up at this part and try to LFG and hopefully get other people with the right classes who are also up to the same exact part of the quest.
Absolutely love this quest – also feel really happy for the guys over at r/raidsecrets for finally getting a real puzzle to investigate and theorise about, two years after the “sixth VoG chest” theories. It’s like Bungie saw the reaction to the time-gated Sleeper/NTTE quests, and the disappointment that Oryx’s basketball court served no actual purpose, and crafted a proper puzzle with a high barrier to discovery that also required a huge amount of community participation and technical expertise to solve, with a cool reward at the end.
Kudos; looking forward to completing this with my raid group at some point.
I want to see more insanely convoluted stuff like this in more games.
Dark souls needs stuff like this.