Since the most recent weekly reset on November 8, players in Destiny 2 were quickly greeted with a strange update to the game’s most infamous weapon, the Telesto fusion rifle. Initially, the weapon’s behavior was passed off as yet another bug, as Telesto has a very sordid history of this – to the point of being disabled in-game many times since its debut in the Curse of Osiris expansion. Then, players began to suspect that maybe this wasn’t something unintentional and instead potentially the beginnings of a puzzle. Telesto had new animations where the weapon would vibrate and spark in the player’s hands while firing slow-moving projectiles in a strange arc towards the sky. Eagle-eyed Redditors on the Raid Secrets subreddit also noticed the projectiles were forming patterns as they arced away into the sky, mainly as stellar constellations. Players reported seeing Leo, Pleaides, Aquila, and Orion. Many speculated hints of a location somewhere in-game, but hours of hunting around led to nothing of merit.
Then on November 9, Destiny’s Twitter account was seemingly taken over by Telesto itself. Posts alluding to the weapon gaining sentience and communicating with users peppered the account for several hours with messages from Telesto. An in-game message also found its way into players’ screens, telling them the Telesto invasion was in full swing. Functions of the gun began to change as the day went on with finally a new iteration of the weapon. The weapon fired properly, but now produced void explosions from each pellet fired from the gun after several seconds or on immediate impact with a target. But didn’t do much else. Clues have paused at this point and nothing else has been discovered – which is leaving some fans rather flustered at Bungie.
Destiny has always been fertile ground for community-based mysteries and ARGs, from the time the community found a real replica of Rasputin’s secret weapon hidden in a geocache in North America, to when players decoded a secret series of messages from a journal kept by a crew of miners stationed on Earth’s moon. There has always been a yearning for puzzles to be solved and rewards reaped from the collective effort. As of late, Bungie has been failing to follow through on that effort with only minimal payoff. Not since the discovery of the Presage secret mission has there been a hidden mystery in Destiny 2 that rewarded players with a meaningful trophy to display – like a brand new exotic weapon. When there were secret missions like Zero Hour or Whisper of the Worm, they required a lot of investigation to find real clues to put a solution together.
While a mystery can be an alluring prospect for the community to chase—like we’re some ace detective—it’s a difficult balance to strike the right way. Make it too hard for the average player to figure out, and they’re stuck waiting for a solution to be put out as a guide. Make it too easy, and it seems arbitrary to hide the mystery behind something we know is going to unlock in a matter of days or weeks. Bungie has been expressing too much caution as of late to dare tread back into a realm of making players go off on their own and experiment with clues, even in the midst of an expansion where unraveling a mystery is the majority of the plot. The Witch Queen was promised to be something where players would be spending lots of time solving riddles, when instead all players got was basic missions that said what to do, rather then pointing players to the path forward. Perhaps Bungie is still afraid to take big risks and make Destiny like the days of The Taken King.
While now it could be very late in the expansion’s lifespan to give players a truly meaty secretive experience, possibly going into a future where an alien world like Neptune, where players are left to their own devices to discover keys to the future of Destiny where Light and Dark begin to bleed together.
