Destiny 2 – New ARG Puzzle is Live and the Destiny Community is working on it (Bungie Analyze & Collectors Edition)
Bungie’s latest puzzle has gone live related to Destiny 2 and the community are coming together to try and solve it. Well, some of the community are as the puzzle is exclusive to folks who purchased the Collectors Edition of Beyond Light. Big community puzzles like this aren’t a new thing for the Destiny Community with the Corridors of Time fresh in the mind from earlier on in 2020. The following is a look at the new ARG puzzle and how the Destiny Community are trying to solve it.
Today at approximately around reset time a new Alternate Reality Game kicked off in the Destiny Community. This is where the community has to come together as one big hive mind and solve a big puzzle. The last time this happened we had to find our way through the Corridors of Time in Season of Dawn, which ultimately led us to find Bastion – a new exotic weapon. This time it appears as if lore will be the prize, although this is not yet confirmed. It’s rumoured to be at the moment the missing pages from Clovis Bray’s Journal, also provided with the Beyond Light Collectors Edition. If you want to catch up on the journal so far, then I did a short summary of that here.
It started with the Collectors Edition. In there was a model of a Pyramid Ship, called The Splinter, and it has led lights on it. It also had a mode called Code, which the community then deciphered the code to reveal a URL to this Analyze section on Bungie’s website. This is a single page where you have to input a code. You have to be logged in and enter the correct code to get the right answer. if you type in the wrong answer you get standard access denied message reading something like TOKEN FAILURE // Redeem valid token”.
Through much hard work with those working on the /raidsecrets subreddit, it was discovered the code to enter was ‘CHOOSE’. As well as entering the correct word in the input box, you also had to redeem the code unique to the collector’s edition, matching up these elements and entering the correct code would give you a success message, plus an animated gif.
The animated gif is interesting. It appears to be a white or black square with some animation in there. If you open the gif in a code editor like Sublime Text or Notepad ++ then more data is revealed.
The pieces are semi-unique for most users
The image is a flashing gif
embedded in the gif is a set of text different in each image:
Constructing entanglement scan with a coherency of 48×44…
Decrypting…
Data recovered: SEQ-26003 = ‘l’
Decrypting…
ERROR: Your security permissions prohibit further data extraction at this scale.
Initiating individual bit scan…
Decrypting..?.
Scanning 2,12: No SEQ data found at this coordinate (all 0xFFFFFF)
Scanning 39,2: No SEQ data found at this coordinate (all 0xFFFFFF)
Scanning 40,28: No SEQ data found at this coordinate (all 0xFFFFFF)
Scanning 0,8: No SEQ data found at this coordin?te (all 0xFFFFFF)
Scanning 23,1: No SEQ data found at this coordinate (all 0xFFFFFF)
ERROR: Decryption attempt has compromised coordinate data.
Scanning ERR,ERR: Sequence data fragment found.
Fragment data follows…
It’s likely that we’re going to get the missing page of Clovis Bray’s Journal. Perhaps we’ll find out what happened to Elsie Bray and how she became The Exo Stranger. The last we heard from Elisabeth in the journal was her reluctantly going to Europa to see her Grandfather. Perhaps he removed the pages from the journal because he was so ashamed of what he’d done to her.
If you have got the collectors edition and want to contribute to this community puzzle then you can! Simply reedem your emblem code on the collectors edition to receive your piece of the puzzle on the Bungie Analyze section of the website and send it to the URL which you can find on this reddit post under Important Links.
It’s slightly disappointing that everyone can’t contribute at this stage, however, we don’t yet know what is going to happen. Perhaps the Collectors Edition folks have to work together to unlock something for the rest of us in game. Currently there is no ‘in-game’ component to the puzzle, this is purely outside the game at the moment.
We’re at the gathering data stage of the puzzle at the moment and there’s plenty of unknowns. However, there are a few things we do know that may or may not be connected to this puzzle.
Some planets and moons are due to either disappear or be locked down by the darkness. We know our director is changing to have them removed, but we don’t yet know if they are going to be destroyed. There’s rumours they will be coming back in a reworked state later on, so I don’t expect them to be destroyed outright – perhaps just quarantined (which is fitting for 2020).
Destiny is going offline for a significant amount of time before Beyond Light drops (I think it’s 14 hours or so). Could we see a Fortnite Style event where Bungie provide a lore reason for everything going offline?
There’s a calamity Protocol Emblem in the database, which we’ve discussed before on the channel. There’s rumours of a live event before the event before the end of the season, and folks have their eyes on Saturday for a potential start time for that event. That has not been confirmed and we just had the last This Week At Bungie before beyond Light arrives on November 10th and nothing was mentioned, so I’m skeptical that an event will occur at all.
It will be intresting to see how the puzzle plays out and what it leads to – I’ll keep you posted about anything that does happen and what people find over the next few hours and days.
Let me know down in the comments if you like these puzzles and if you have the collectors edition and have managed to get involved!
That’s it for this look at the new ARG puzzle and how the Destiny Community are trying to solve it. For more This Week In Video Games content, subscribe on YouTube today.