Remnant 2’s Wild Data Mining Puzzle Was Solved by Someone with No Coding Experience, a Fridge Full of Red Bull, and ChatGPT

ign.com:

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.