Cryptic Past
At the start of 2020, Bungie set the Destiny community one of it’s most unique challenges yet. In turn, that led to some of the most unique interactions within that community.
Bungie is no stranger to setting cryptic quests up for it’s playerbase. The Reddit community /r/RaidSecrets is founded on these mysterious puzzles. This time last year, the Niobe Labs Torment caused almost insufferable pain to the groups who attempted to unravel it’s complex clues. Even 15 years ago in 2004, they were starting along this path with I Love Bees. It’s one of the many things that keeps Destiny exciting as a live title for some. There’s always the possibility that some hidden Quest or Lore is kicking around in the game just waiting to be discovered, and every new update could bring undocumented changes that hint at them. The rewards for this vigilant dissection of every piece of the game have also been wide and varied, including a real-life replica spear hidden in the woods in upstate New York.
But Niobe Labs may have been the breaking point. Dense, esoteric references and clues slowly drove those solving it mad. Were they making progress? What was the next wild theory they could try? The community was rife with suggestions, at time becoming increasingly frustrated that those leading the charge would ignore their ideas, resolute that their revelation must be the key.
The Corridors of Time puzzle is, from that perspective, Bungie’s greatest riddle yet.
Let’s Do The Time Walk Again
The Corridors of Time are a new location added as part of Season of the Dawn. They are a non-euclidean space where you walk through time itself. Previously, they had only been used as a space between combat zones as part of the main Story missions that comprised this Season. However, as of January 14th they became available to access freely. Walking aimlessly through them would lead nowhere though, and on that day Bungie also gave us directions.
This would be Step 1 of the puzzle, and would follow Bungie’s design philosophy from Raids. They first introduce an idea, and by encounter design ensure you have fully understood it before you can progress. This lets them build on that idea later, because they know that you have learned how a mechanic works.
As soon as the weekly reset occurred, and Osiris granted players access to the Corridors of Time, it was noted that Obelisks (a key feature of the Seasonal activities) were displaying symbols on them that correlated to the signposted doors in the Corridors of Time. Players quickly realised that following these symbols in a specific sequence would lead them to a mysterious grave in the corridors themselves. A new Lore entry would be acquired, the first of 19 in a Lore Book. But approaching the grave itself would teleport the player away out of the room. With every passing hour, the sequences changed, more Lore was acquired, and every time the grave remained out of reach.
However, a new pattern was also emerging. Each tomb had, below the floor, a unique motif. Experienced Destiny riddlers knew that there was more to this than met the eye. As the day progressed, those 19 designs would become key to the second learning. Each subterranean pattern was a jigsaw piece. The complex codes on the edges showed players how to put them together, and that completed 19-piece jigsaw formed a map. Along the path from the Entrance to the Exit, the route passed over 11 symbols. When players followed this route, they would find a final resting place, receive an Emblem, and once again observe an arrangement of symbols under their floor. Unlike the first set of puzzle pieces though, it seemed that every player was getting their own unique set of symbols.
Taking what was learned from before, the next step seemed obvious. We were going to build a bigger map, together. But nobody was prepared for quite how big that map was going to be.
Piecing it all Together
Producing this map would be an epic undertaking, and there are 6 major steps to doing so. First players had to Run the corridors, and take a Screenshot at the end. They then needed to Upload this, where it would be Transcribed, and put into a Spreadsheet, from which a Map was formed.
These six major steps would form the basis of various bottlenecks and optimisations over the next week, and I found what happened here particularly interesting. First though, I want to give respect to a lot of the unseen and unheard people who made this possible. They acted as Producers, helping everyone organize towards this common goal. Forging an efficient team and process in a week is a monumental task, not least of which when that team numbers in the thousands.
In the beginning, there was chaos. Numerous different spreadsheets, publically open for any and all to input their data from their own runs. Transcription notation differed from group to group. The amount of data available was small, and quality low, so anyone even attempting to do any mapping was getting nowhere.
One of the early attempts at optimisation aimed to condense 3 whole steps of the process. A web-page allowed players to recreate the pattern as it appeared on their screens, and would turn that into one consistent notation to be added to spreadsheets. This ultimately failed, for numerous reasons. A small bug in it meant that the generated notation would actually differ between different browsers, but whilst this could be fixed there were two greater problems. It left no paper trail, and depended on the community to be able to accurate read and copy the patterns from their screens. Without any original screenshot for verification, the validity of any notation could never be cross checked in the event of conflicts found. There are also many intricacies and ambiguities in reading the symbols, which was easy for an expert eye, but incredibly difficult for an untrained one.
It was bridging over one of the main divides across these activities. Some of these tasks were easy for anyone to do. Some were difficult for the untrained, but easy once they had experience. Finally, some were trivial for a computer, but very difficult for a human. Running the Corridors, taking a Screenshot and Uploading it were all relatively trivial for every single player of Destiny. Analysing those screenshots and correctly notating them required expertise, but also discipline to be able to do it for longs periods. Finally, finding patterns and matches to assist those entering the data and build the maps is a task best done by software.
By the first weekend, these divisions were clear. Optimisations were happening for the wider community; Running became a matter of getting a streamer to the end of the route and then having viewers join and leave their party in succession, avoiding having to do a time consuming run. Submitting uploaded screenshots became more routine through Forms (although many were still collated by hand). However, it placed a huge bottleneck on exactly one part of the process; the transcription. Transcription required accurately turning an image into 49 pieces of data and entering them correctly into a spreadsheet. As the number of unique hexes grew two things became clear; this jigsaw was a gigantic 5,000 pieces, and increasingly screenshots being transcribed were simply duplicates.
The first major optimisation came in early detection of duplicates. The spreadsheet had already had automated duplicate detection built into it, but now that was triggering much earlier in the process after just a couple of links. They could stop transcribing duplicate hexes earlier and move on to the next. But as the map grew and became more complete, one act of brilliance massively accelerated the final stages. Bounties. Key pieces which help build the critical path across the maze were being requested, with the spartan information known about them. The link codes around the outside were known, but the walls which would form the maze itself and the symbol on it were not. This leveraged the huge power of the community, and the response was phenomenal to behold. 20,000 viewers on the stream being asked to see if they had found the pieces needed in their traversal of the Corridors, and within minutes each was found. A huge step above hoping the next screenshot would be the one they needed.
Throughout this, mapping code written days ago continued to give everyone involved hope. It was the visual end of everything they were doing, and it’s almost organic growing form gave everyone the impetus to surge forward and do more. A shout out to @tj09, who built awesome automated tools for this which meant that the map could be seen growing with every new line transcribed.
In the end, at 9am on Monday morning some 130+ hours after it all began, the solution was found and players surged to collect their prize. Nothing could live up to the expectations built up over the week though.
A Legacy
Whilst I doubt that the reward will live on long in players memories, the process by which it was obtained certainly will for those involved. The Corridors of Time represents a significantly leap forward in how Bungie designs their puzzles.
First and foremost, it was an inclusive collaborative affair. The previous ones were competitive. Who would get world first? Clues and discoveries were secrets to be hoarded for fear of giving other teams an advantage. Here it all but forced those teams to work together and share data to find the solution. More importantly, it allowed the wider community to be a useful part of the process from beginning to end.
Second, they learnt from themselves with how they designed Raid Encounters. Each step built upon the previous, and required complete understanding before moving forward. But the next steps were logical, methodical, and followed on as well. Rarely was it unclear that the path we were on was correct.
Finally, the solution was continuous, not discrete. It didn’t come about all at once because someone suddenly got it right, it was everyone getting it right hour after hour day after day that moved it inexorably forward to it’s conclusion.
I’m eagerly awaiting the next iteration of Bungie’s cryptic riddles, as they continue to improve and iterate their own quirky and unique way of interacting with the community.