Players in Guild Wars found an eight-year-old Easter egg this week after a former developer on the game offered some hints and teases to help move people in the right direction.
Earlier this month, Vlambeer developer Jan Willem Nijman asked others to share Easter eggs and secrets hidden in their games on Twitter. Hundreds of developers responded to the tweet, sharing loads of secrets. Matthew Moore, a former dev at ArenaNet, explained that hidden in Guild Wars was a secret weapon that could only be found after talking to NPCs known as Xulani Archivists. But he admitted that it was maybe too well hidden, as nobody ever found it.
There’s a weapon hidden in the original Guild Wars that I don’t think anyone’s found yet. We hid some clues in the dialogues of some wiki editor tribute NPCs who only show up during the Wayfarer’s Reverie, but…I think we hid it too well. Too poorly? Could have done it betta. ????
— Matthew (@ironmaus) April 11, 2021
This tweet, plus a small note left by Moore on the GW wiki and more hints and teases, helped point the community in the right direction. Before this, nobody had connected the dots that the dialogue spoken by the Xulani Archivists were clues to a hidden weapon. With this new information, players began trying to find a solution to this puzzle. It wasn’t easy, as documented in this Reddit thread. During this, Moore warned Easter egg hunters that there was a real chance that this nearly decade-old Easter egg might not work anymore.
“This was intended as an Easter egg,” explained Moore in a follow-up wiki note. “Which means we didn’t test it as rigorously as core content (or even outside our staging environment), and it was never intended to be core content. It’s eight-years-old, unmonitored, unmaintained content. Will it work? Probably.”
Yesterday, someone finally found the hidden weapon. Reddit user Evaziel posted a screenshot of the Silver Edge’s stats with the title “Found iiiiiiiiiit yeahhhhhh.”
“There´s a spot where Kilroy spawns in Drakkar near Sinhala, you gotta go solo, luck from fortunes, gods favours up, drop a cupcake or eat a cupcake (i did both so not sure) in front of Kilroy, light of Deldrimor, a silver Vaettir will spawn, kill it.”
Using this information Guild Wars YouTuber GWReborn uploaded a video showing off how to get this secret weapon, which is named after a prolific GW Wiki editor. It seems complicated, and Guild Wars players don’t seem impressed by the sword itself. But with these things, it’s the hunt that’s often the best part. The sword was added to the game in 2013 during a special event involving the Xulani Archivists.
Earlier this month a very similar series of events happened in Halo 5. Like this situation, it took some extra clues from the devs before players finally found the hidden Mongoose race. I now assume every old game I play has at least one super-hidden secret buried in it.
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