Bungie Opens Destiny 2 DLC After Players Fail To Unlock It

The guardian of Niobe Labs in Destiny 2.

Rather than be a raid trial or even a massive boss encounter, it turns out the most difficult challenge the Destiny community has ever had to face was an in-game puzzle. It was so challenging, in fact, that Bungie decided to bypass it completely and simply unlock the door it protected.

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The above tweet comes from Bungie a little over a day after it launched a puzzling gateway leading to the Bergusia Forge, the final destination in the current season's Black Armory adventure for Destiny 2.

Without getting too deep into Destiny lore, the premise was pretty simple. Over the past weeks, players have been earning access to forges within Niobe Labs which, in turn, granted players new and exciting weapons. To get to Niobe Labs, Bungie concocted a multi-tiered, complex puzzle that players were meant to solve as a community. It turns out the puzzle was perhaps a bit too difficult and, as a result, player backlash led Bungie to simply kick open the door regardless of the fact that the puzzle has yet to be solved.

The puzzle is still available for dedicated players to tackle, but I imagine that will come secondary to simply diving into Niobe Labs to grab some sweet, sweet loot.

As for the puzzle, it was definitely a head-scratcher. Players had to look at cryptic clues and environmental hints on monitors and the like in order to figure out where to go and which in-game glyphs to shoot. One of the big issues was that there were no checkpoints built into the puzzle so, if you screwed up, you got kicked back to the beginning.

What was really cool about this concept was the fact that it only required one player or team to solve the puzzle in order to unlock the Bergusia Forge for everybody. It was designed as a communal challenge, with players expected to work together and grind away at the gears until a solution was discovered. Apparently the limit for that is just 24 hours, as that's when even the most dedicated of streamers started throwing in the towel.

The thing about these mega-challenges in Destiny is that they usually get plowed through within a matter of hours. When Forsaken launched last fall, the first team to beat that DLC's raid triggered an in-game change for all players. Bungie was clearly trying to do something similar with this latest puzzle, but the end result wasn't the same.

The team updated the blog to explain that perhaps gating highly-anticipated content behind a tough-as-nails puzzle wasn't the best idea, but I'm not so sure I would agree. I mean, it only took a single day for folks to give up. I'm not saying their effort up to that point wasn't impressive, but is a day really the limit for what was supposed to be a communal puzzle-solving event? I remember playing Xi within PlayStation Home back in the day and we literally worked for days on end to figure out our way through that game's impressive puzzles. (Gramps shakes his fist at the kids on his lawn.)

Anyway, as noted above, you can still take a crack at the puzzle if you like -- and solving it will still grant some additional rewards -- but, otherwise, the lock to the Bergusia Forge in D2 has been removed.

Ryan Winslett

Staff Writer for CinemaBlend.