It’s less than a week before the launch of Destiny 2‘s next big expansion, Beyond Light, and Bungie has decided to pass the time by inviting players to participate in another elaborate ARG puzzle.
It all began a couple weeks ago when some folks started to receive their collector’s edition of Destiny 2: Beyond Light. The boxed sets contain lots of extras, including postcards, notebooks, and a pyramid statue, among other stuff. But because this is Bungie, the collectibles also served a secondary function, forming individual pieces of a larger puzzle tied to a countdown timer that ended today at 1:00 p.m. ET.
Destiny sleuths over on the RaidSecrets subreddit and Discord channel pored over each item and slowly decoded diagrams of cylinders and pages of dots to arrive at some answers, including codes for new Beyond Light Emblems and some interesting, but as of yet, unsolved patterns. All of the homework involved with this effort has been collected here.
The biggest part of this ARG revolves around the pyramid statue and a special Emblem code that’s unique to each postcard in each collector’s edition. The statue itself blinks in several places, and Destiny 2 player Bachmanetti discovered that by plotting each blink on a corresponding chart in the logbook, the word “Choose” was revealed. The logbook also contained a reference to a Bungie URL that asks players to analyse random sets of characters.
For players who have redeemed the collector’s edition postcard Emblem code, the text field on the URL becomes blank, allowing people to type in “Choose.” Doing so then returns a page of text and a GIF of a blinking square (some of which go on for a very long time).
— Melmsie (@realmelmsie) October 20, 2020
The text and GIFs appear to be unique to each collector edition, and so the community has been calling on players who have one to copy the web address for the page their code spits out and share it in a giant spreadsheet. To try and find some pattern in the chaos, developers in the game’s community are creating programs to analyse the data coming in, and there’s even a webpage where you can play around with the blinking blocks to get a different idea of how they might fit together.
What will happen at the end of it? Nobody knows. The current theory is that the final pattern will reveal some written text, possibly the missing pages from the collector’s edition journal, AKA a lore dump external to the game. Players are also currently waiting to see if Bungie wraps up the current Season of Arrivals with another live in-game event of some kind. This could be a prelude to that, or something completely separate.
Destiny has had its fair share of complex, drawn-out puzzles over the years. Some have required several days of thousands of players working together to solve them, like the Corridors of Time labyrinth from earlier this year. Others have stumped players altogether. One even led a person to actual treasure in upstate New York. The rewards have varied from overpowered to lacklustre, but the journeys themselves have almost always been fascinating to watch.
Hopefully Destiny’s brain trust can crack this one before the new expansion goes live. You can watch some of them work in real time over on RaidSecrets’ TheHopelite’s Twitch stream.
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