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Destiny's Latest Mystery Involves ARG Elements, Intricate Codes
Bungie has frequently had the Destiny community solving intricate, difficult puzzles both in and outside the game in order to claim big rewards, and it seems the developer is wasting no time after the launch of the latest expansions, Rise of Iron, to put the community's codebreakers to work.
The latest puzzle incorporates elements of alternate reality games (ARG), as well as some decoding. Logging in with your Xbox One/PlayStation Network credentials at this Bungie-owned site produces the ASCII image seen above, the word "Node" followed by a series of shapes, numeric forwarding protocols, a processing key, and a long text string of seemingly random characters.
According to the Reddit Destiny community, users are receiving one of several text strings, which may be able to be re-configured into .jpeg images. The community is looking to compile as many these images as possible in the hopes that collecting several of them will reveal some new secret in the game. Whether it's a new exotic weapon or story details, is unknown. There is also a chest hidden deep within the latest Raid, Wrath of the Machine, which players have yet to figure out how to open; this puzzle may also end up leading players to unlocking it.
This ARG does not seem to be related to the pre-launch status effect which was "infecting" players and providing them with bonus experience.
[Source: Bungie.net]
Our Take
I have to admit that as a lapsed Destiny player, this is pretty cool. Hopefully they'll have figured this one out by the time I start playing again, so I can get whatever reward this leads to without doing all the heavy decrypting work.
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