The people at Gunfire Games, makers of the recent looter-shooter soulslike Remnant 2, will be the first to tell you they’ve got a love for secrets.
Rich Vorodi, one of the team’s principal game designers who focuses on quests, levels, and puzzles, gushed to IGN about the team’s obsession with hiding things in all their games.
“We just love to put secrets in everything,” he said. “It allows us to stir up conversations amongst people we’ve never even met and just provide a little awe and mystery.”
In some of their past projects, like 2019’s Remnant: From The Ashes, data mining sucked some of the mystery out of their game a little earlier than they’d have liked. It’s certainly not a new problem, but while Gunfire Games processed their disappointment at spoiled surprises, they also began thinking of ways to use the existence of data mining to their advantage that would reach fruition some three years later.
“We’re always going to have data miners,” Ben Cureton, Remnant 2’s principal game designer on progression and gear, told IGN. [Disclosure: Cureton and I routinely play co-op games such as Diablo 4 together.] “That was the initial catalyst of going, ‘Hey, let's come up with something really interesting where [data miners] look into the files and they go, ‘Hey, what's this?’ And we were gonna have like a puzzle on it, or a math equation, or some kind of weird stuff. We had a lot of theories.
“I had talked to [Gunfire Games CEO] Dave about this three years ago, in regards to having a puzzle that had to be data mined. And the idea was, if you understand the lore of the game, then you understand that The Root is going places it shouldn't, because there's no protection and the Guardian is dead, and they're invading other worlds. What if the player, on some weird meta level, was doing that? Like, they had to invade an unprotected world that didn't have cheat protection?”
The idea made the cut, and the team decided to hide one of their most highly sought-after prizes, one of the game’s 11 archetypes (essentially character classes), behind a puzzle that only data miners could solve.
The Cult of the Door
As expected, on the same day Remnant 2 became available to players, it instantly became datamined, with players discovering the existence of every item and unlockable, including all 11 archetypes. But while weapons and equipment were quickly collected by players, one final unlockable eluded them for days on end: the final archetype the developers had hidden the answer to in the code itself.
The Remnant 2 community’s hunt led them to a mysterious “corrupted” door that no one could seem to open. As the hours and days dragged on with no one able to solve the mystery, a group of some of the most dedicated players and data miners banded together to figure it out on Discord. Among this ragtag bunch was a player named Oliver Nikolic (who goes by Barut on Discord) who had seemingly little chance of uncovering this deeply buried secret. That’s because he’d never done any data mining before and didn’t have any programming experience that’s common in the data mining community.
What he did have was 15 Red Bulls, a premium subscription to ChatGPT, and a lot of free time.
“I came across a red door in the Labyrinth, but I couldn't interact with it but it looks like something really important. I came to reddit to ask about it only to find out that there were already many posts about it. So over a few hours it slowly became a new challenge that needed to be solved and I came across a Discord solely made for solving it,” Barut told IGN.
“On that discord I met people that kind of were categorizing themselves in few groups: ones that wanted to do it by looking for clues inside the game only, ones that wanted to hack it, ones that wanted to datamine it, and a group like me who couldn't label ourselves as we were trying to solve it with mix of different angles. It kept being a stronger and stronger obsession to solve it – I would go out and a thought would cross my mind, ‘What if?’ so I said to myself, ‘Okay’, grabbed 15 Red Bulls and got to it.”
15 Cans of Red Bull on the Wall
Barut’s almost nonstop efforts over the course of five days (averaging only four hours of sleep per day and no other breaks) included lots of back-and-forth with other data miners and secret hunters, plenty of Googling how to do things as a first-time data miner, and when coding was called for, using ChatGPT to generate various scripts.
But that process of trial-and-error and sometimes pretty out-there theories didn’t always gel with the Discord server filled with data mining veterans, with many writing Barut’s suggestions off.
That is, until Barut asked ChatGPT to run a script looking only for items labeled as “corrupted” and made a startling discovery: only one in-game item was corrupted for each slot in a player’s loadout, meaning one could equip oneself with a full loadout of corrupted items. The theory was that doing so would allow a player to pass through the corrupted door to claim the archetype hidden on the other side.
The Discord community gave it a shot, and to their surprise, it worked.
Naturally, the community changed their tone about Barut’s harebrained schemes.
Though Barut ultimately cracked the code, it was the hard work of a whole community of people that made it possible:
Watching (mostly) quietly as this all unfolded, the team at Gunfire Games was pleased with the fruits of their mischievous labors, even going so far as to tantalize the secret hunting community with subtle hints that data mining was the path to success.
Colin Post, Remnant 2’s art director, told IGN, “I think [data mining] could spoil the fun of games – you're trying to hide secrets and stuff, you know? But I think in this case we kinda just leaned into it. We can't stop it. It's gonna happen on the first day. So, and that's why I think that's why this secret worked out so well.”
The community’s reaction to this unique community puzzle so far has been overwhelmingly positive, with those in the know about Remnant’s story singing its praises on X (formerly Twitter).
Ok this is fucking insanely unique and VERY cool. A playable class that only dataminers can find.
— Skarrow9 (@Skarrow9) July 29, 2023
That's sick https://t.co/3imTU3utDN
I'm telling you, Remnant II is something else entirely. I'm consistently blown away. An absolute gem. https://t.co/dM2Xw45YRZ
— TehMidge (Mikey Perfected) (@TehMidgeQA) July 29, 2023
But Gunfire Games admits, something like this isn’t likely to work a second time.
“I think you can only do it once,” said Vorodi. “You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. If you know Gunfire Games products, like, we just love to put secrets in everything. And so the chances of us doing another super, mega secret I'm sure is high. And I couldn't even possibly tell you how it would unfold.”
