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Destiny 2's Latest Puzzle Is Turning Out To Be Brain-Breakingly Complex

Destiny 2 players have hit a brick wall in their quest to solve the popular online shooter’s latest puzzle. Now they’re pulling marathon sessions searching for the next breakthrough in a community-wide effort that is turning out to be the Destiny equivalent of mapping the human genome.

The game’s Corridors of Time area is a labyrinth of hexagonal rooms connected by portals. This week’s update opened them up for free exploration outside of directed story missions. It also introduced a puzzle. Each room consists of six doorways, each represented with a different symbol. But nothing inside the maze tells players where to go. On Tuesday of this week, players located codes on four Obelisks that were added to Destiny 2 in the beginning of this season. These show how to navigate to special “vault” rooms containing bits of lore.

By Wednesday, they’d created a map out of screenshots of the symbols underneath the floor of each vault. This led them to a new vault containing a special emblem, but the Corridors of Time quest itself remained unfinished. That’s when the puzzle became exponentially more complicated, becoming reminiscent of big mysteries in the series’ past like 2016’s bewildering Outbreak Prime quest.

Each of these special emblem rooms had its own set of symbols below the floor. There would always be a large symbol in in a central hex surrounded by rings of other symbols and empty spaces on smaller hexes. But this time, different players were seeing different sets of symbols. People started sharing what they saw, submitting sets by the hundreds and thousands on the Raid Secrets subreddit and the Discord groups of popular Destiny 2 streamers like Sean “Gladd” Gallagher. They’ve since been collected into a master spreadsheet.

The result has been a sprawling map of each unique vault room sequence. Where two sequences share symbols on one side of their outer rings, they get connected, just like dominoes. While some chains only run for a few sequences before cutting off, others have gone on for much longer. One chain goes on for over 300 sequences. The working theory is that at some point, enough different sequences will be collected and allow players to finish a giant new map, or at least find the code for the series of rooms players need to go through to get to the master vault.

Bungie said in a tweet earlier in the week that the puzzle was “a marathon, not a sprint.” But this hasn’t stopped players from burning the midnight oil on it. This brute-force phase of the puzzle is pushing the most dedicated players and streamers to their limits; they’re playing for over 20 hours straight in some cases and getting very little sleep in the process. T After all, who wants to be caught away from their computer when the final solution is eventually discovered?

Each vault room contains a tomb with a sword and a ghost sitting on it, but when players try to get close to it, they’re teleported back to the previous room. Players have speculated about what might be inside—maybe an exotic sword or another returning weapon from Destiny 1—but since the maze involves the breakdown and fragmentation of time itself, it could be anything, really.

Whatever gets revealed, the rate of progress is speeding up thanks in part to a new automated tool that’s greatly speeding up the process of mapping the new data coming in from players. Earlier today, Sweatcicle, one of Destiny 2’s top raiders, guessed that at the current rate the puzzle might finally be solved in the next 48 hours.
 
I have 500 hours in Destiny 2 since it hit Steam and can't be bothered to engage in a puzzle like this, it's just way too absurd, I do enjoy the hoopla surrounding these things and occasionally checking on the progress streamers like Gladd have made, and I'll certainly appreciate whatever rewards it leads to (last puzzle lead to things like Izanagi's Burden and Jotunn). These community effort things are certainly interesting, they're not my favorite aspect of the game, I prefer stuff regular gamers can actually figure out in around 6 hours going blind (the raids, for instance) but I'm glad they do stuff like this, it's really neat.
 

PocoJoe

Banned
I still remember how in Destiny 1 there were similar situation, for some new excotic I think.

People spend like weeks to sniff around every corner of the world, "decode" some random ambient noises to find codes, decode some ramdom shit on some screens in game and all the crazy stuff you could imagine.

And then bungie just said "lol we didnt add the quest yet, here it is now" and it were just simple stupid quest that anybody could get easily.

The day I quit destiny, after +2000h.

Fucking asshole move to let people search like maniacs for weeks and not tell that it is waste of time god damn it.
 
I still remember how in Destiny 1 there were similar situation, for some new excotic I think.

People spend like weeks to sniff around every corner of the world, "decode" some random ambient noises to find codes, decode some ramdom shit on some screens in game and all the crazy stuff you could imagine.

And then bungie just said "lol we didnt add the quest yet, here it is now" and it were just simple stupid quest that anybody could get easily.

The day I quit destiny, after +2000h.

Fucking asshole move to let people search like maniacs for weeks and not tell that it is waste of time god damn it.
Bungie fell off so hard after Halo.
 
When the quest began I expected an exotic weapon reward, so I'm not thinking "lame". I guess they could do more but honestly they've kept me pretty addicted to their content. I might expect more the more distance from their Activision split we get but they made it pretty clear things were a mess for them and they need time to get things where they want them.
 

MoreJRPG

Suffers from extreme PDS

Lame.
Imagine wasting all that time just for that? I tuned in to a couple streams over the weekend and it was just boring. People staring at Google sheets and talking over each other.

How do people find this fun? Turning games into homework. You don’t even get a ‘A’ at the end of it.
 
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Imagine wasting all that time just for that? I tuned in to a couple streams over the weekend and it was just boring. People staring at Google sheets and talking over each other.

How do people find this fun? Turning games into homework. You don’t even get a ‘A’ at the end of it.
Compare this to P.T. Demo which actually had an amazing and satisfying payoff shows the difference between Bungie and Kojima Productions in terms of creating genuine hype/intrigue/mystery.
 
Imagine wasting all that time just for that? I tuned in to a couple streams over the weekend and it was just boring. People staring at Google sheets and talking over each other.

How do people find this fun? Turning games into homework. You don’t even get a ‘A’ at the end of it.
Compare this to P.T. Demo which actually had an amazing and satisfying payoff shows the difference between Bungie and Kojima Productions in terms of creating genuine hype/intrigue/mystery.

The PT demo pay-off was a trailer for a game that will never exist. If the puzzle feels like homework... don't do it? It's a community challenge, not everyone in the community was involved, though, you didn't have to be doing it if you didn't want to, you can reap the rewards all the same.
 

VertigoOA

Banned
The puzzle was a neat community event. No reward would’ve been received well outside of Gjalajorn and Vex Mythoclast. I was hoping for some kind of world state change honestly but that’s still rumored for later in the season.

The quest unlocks for everyone in an hour, without the maze I believe... I dunno. I got it yesterday so don’t care really and it took about 10 mins to run it... ya know because I had to put zero effort into any of this.

It’s a monster in pvp. Absolute monster. One slug can kill a player and it fires 3 per trigger pull, can kill 3 players in a single pull if you’re that good, and can destroy someone in their super. I honestly went on my biggest pvp tear because of it. Super fun

It makes short work of scrubs running around with shotguns. Looking forward to claims about it being broken in crucible this week’s iron banner. It’s great. A great answer to Chaperone, Lord of Wolves and Erentil... the latter two being actually broken because a fusion rifle shouldn’t be able to map someone from 40 meters... and lord of wolves is a zero skill weapon like Jotunn.
 
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