Bungie has given up on a special Desinty 2 event after the game’s top players spent more than a day trying to solve its toughest challenges.
See, Bungie recently released a series of challenges called the Niobe Labs as the final part of their Black Armory DLC release. The idea was that multiple squads would all compete to be the first team to beat these challenges (like we see with every Destiny raid). Once a squad did beat the Niobe Labs challenge, they would unlock the Bergusia Forge for all the players in the game. Simple, right?
Wrong. See, the puzzles in Niobe Labs required players to shoot certain symbols in order to progress through a series of rooms. In order to determine which symbol they had to shoot, players had to solve some incredibly obscure puzzles that seemingly make no sense when you first see them. Only through some clever analysis and constant attempts could players hope to solve the lab’s most challenging puzzles.
That’s nice and all, but the big problem with this challenge was that failing one room would send you back to the very beginning. This meant that players not only had no idea how to beat the later rooms, but they also became increasingly frustrated every time that they had to start over just to earn the right to fail at the puzzle they couldn’t solve yet again. You can imagine how angry people were after about 24 hours worth of failed attempts.
Eventually, Bungie had to step in and scrap the entire idea.
“While coming together as a community to solve puzzles can be fun, setting this puzzle up as a gate between you and new content that you want to play has not been an ideal experience,” said Bungie via an update on their website. “As such, we will be decoupling the puzzle from the final offering of the Black Armory. All Annual Pass owners will be able to experience the Bergusia Forge when the puzzle is solved or when the deadline expires – whichever happens first.”
Bungie stated that the Niobe Labs will remain open for those who still want to try to complete the challenge, but their initial good idea to tie a global event to the completion of this challenge has proven to be something of a bust. It’s going to be interesting to see whether Bungie employs this tactic again or whether this affects the difficulty of future Destiny 2 challenges.