Lots of games are released with collector’s editions, but few are as involved as those that accompany
Engineering director Michael Williams works on Bungie’s Central Technology team most of the time, but he has a “sideline” working on designing collector’s edition puzzles.
“For emblem puzzles, we want them to be a fun discovery process that a single person could do or describe to a friend in a single sentence,” Williams said. “We want these puzzles to feel as ‘in-universe’ as possible, so it’s important to make them fit thematically, and even think about who might be embedding the codes. Puzzles related to Clovis Bray should feel different than something from Ikora.
“One extra challenge is that emblem codes are essentially random strings of numbers and letters, so fitting them naturally into the collector’s edition content can be difficult. Early on, we chat about materials available, locations we could work puzzles in, and non-puzzle imagery the collector’s edition might include. I take that and draft up four to five ‘programmer art’ versions of puzzles we could integrate, and the group talks through them. Then the team takes that art and makes it look incredible. In some cases, they take the ideas to amazing places–in the latest collector’s edition, the artist turned an idea for a robot pawprint into an incredible maze. In at least one case, the team took my art as-is, because they felt it fit the feel of the character!”
Some collector’s edition puzzles have gotten incredibly complex, however. For Shadowkeep, the collector’s edition included a sort of puzzle box called a Cryptoglyph, which could be opened like a combination lock using clues hidden within the package. Inside was a piece of paper directing players to a website, where they could access a tiny sliver of an image. By all sharing the images they found, the Destiny 2 community was able to stitch those slivers together to reveal an entire additional lore book related to the expansion. Williams said that particular puzzle was one of his favorites.
“For more complex online puzzles, I try to think about how the community will participate,” Williams said. “I like to think about it as a giant jigsaw puzzle, where everyone has a piece to provide, even if they don’t know how to assemble it. Our community is brilliant, and you can give them almost any near-impossible challenge and they will solve it.”
“We put a lot of work and love into the lore book and the autograph book to help convey that connection between the characters of the game and the player,” said Dalgarn. “Smudges and intentional little imperfections in a character’s handwriting all lend to that and help us deliver these puzzles in such a way that aims to pull the player into the game without them ever needing to fire up their console or PC. We always want the puzzles to be challenging but rewarding, so we do what we can to deliver visual clues or hints to help guide players without outright giving them the answers.”
In a lot of ways, Destiny and Destiny 2’s collector’s editions have grown with the game as Bungie has dialed in exactly what Destiny is. They weren’t always quite so involved or complex, but as the game has grown to encompass deeper stories, more fleshed-out characters, and greater mysteries, so have the physical packages evolved to follow suit. The collector’s editions have changed to bring more life to the game, in many cases physically manifesting things that have only existed on the screens and imaginations of players and developers.
“There’s something magical about holding something that you’ve experienced only digitally for a long time,” Dixon said. “The Consumer Products team has a very fun job, but we take it seriously. We want our players to feel that all of our products authentically express the digital world and characters that they have come to love.”
