Update: Aldridge published a follow up reply to the original comment:
“Ah, that’s fair tracking – it just means that so far we haven’t decided it’s worth investing in crypto. That may change in the future, and I don’t haven’t seen the presence/absence of encryption fueling decisions on whether to do covert missions – after all, we have other surprises regardless, eg narrative twists, and datamine leaks don’t make us no shy away from those. :)”
Original story: Secret Missions and Quests have always been a big part of Destiny 2 and the one the community has been asking for more over the past two months. The Whisper and Zero Hour missions remain one of the best secret missions, if not the best Bungie added to the game.
Bungie Chief of Engineering David Aldridge and Senior Director of Engineering Ylan Salsbury made a AMA on Reddit yesterday, where they answered questions from the community – some Destiny 2 related, some not so much.
An user asked how difficult is it to encrypt secrets and covert missions in Destiny 2 to avoid data mining and if that is something they are working on. Aldridge replied that “it’s just expensive” to encrypt anything related to a secret mission and that the team concluded that it “makes more sense to spend [those resources] on cooler experiences instead.”
“We dug this pretty deep a few times – several brilliant people here are passionate about this.
“The main challenge is the network of connections between content elements. Suppose you want to encrypt a secret mission. Ok… let’s mark the world art spaces (bubbles) and the activity itself as “encrypt behind this key which we will post later”. Victory!
Related: Destiny 2 has resumed raids to get new Exotic and Legendary weapons under one condition
“Except… hm, there are some mission rewards we also want to hide, their flavor text contains spoilers. And the pieces of audio that are handled in a separate pipeline for localization, we should tag them. Oh, and then there are quests we’ve created that involve playing that mission over and over again, you also have to encrypt them.
“Oh shit, now there’s validation systems yelling at us because we just punched holes in all these different sets of content, which broke the references again other content sets…we need to change how they work.
“Like most things, everything is solvable, it’s just expensive, and so far we’ve concluded that it makes more sense to spend on cooler experiences instead.
“All of this would have been a lot cheaper if we had considered it at the system design stage and forced more modularity around things we might want to keep secret in the future…but we had a lot of other priorities. in mind at the time and we didn’t foresee the future value of secrets and surprises,” Aldridge concluded.
Source: Bungie
Recently, Bungie made a Acquisition of Telesto event where exotic weapon took over Fateofficial social accounts of as a sensitive weapon. It also led to some disappointment in the community as there was no secret puzzle or mission tied to it.
This event also brought some fun little tweaks to the in-game weapon where Telesto fired much like the Deathbringer Rocket Launcher for a day, then adapted the empty projectiles by Graviton Lance.
Following this event, Bungie yesterday released a free Telesto emblem called “Schrödinger’s Gun”. (9LX-7YC-6TX)