Diablo 2: Resurrected players believe they've found a hidden message hiding in the 2.5 update patch notes.
Right at the bottom of the patch note update on the official website – which confirms that Terror Zones have now been rolled out across the main game servers after testing on the Public Test Realm – a photo has been added along with a single sentence: "We were flipping through the old Diablo 2 manual and found this confounding description… what does it all mean?"
The IRL photo shows a ton of cool Diablo-esque props and a book with three codes written on a page, accompanied by a drawing of a pentagram. A real-life ring and a medallion sit on the page, too.
It kicked off a flurry of interest on the game's subreddit (thanks, PCGN) which eventually uncovered that the code could be transcribed by using the 500-year-old cipher, the Vigenere Cipher. Using "Resurrected" as the decryption key – well, that's on one of the medallions – the message apparently says: "So many gems what do these orange numbers mean".
After a bit of trial and error, users remarkably discovered that they could get an orange nine-digit number to appear if they kept spamming the chat gem in an online lobby and from there, believe they found a correlation between that code – thought to be a page number, line number, and word number - and a passage in the Diablo 2 manual.
From there? Well, the dedicated group now believes they've transcribed 664 words of the 666-word passage, with just the 026 word still to decipher (although an educated guess surmises it may be "fate").
To play along, a spreadsheet tracking progress can be found here, and a video discussing how the code was broken can be viewed below:
As for what the secret message says? Well, it's pretty lengthy and wonderfully flowery, but that too in full can be viewed on the Google spreadsheet. It chiefly talks about stones and gems and something about a dark prison...
Why did Diablo 2: Resurrected's Season 1 last as long as it did? According to community manager PezRadar, that was down to the introduction of Terror Zones in the Public Test Realm (PTR).
"Before S1 began, we had noted that we were aiming to have seasons last 4 months," said Pez. "We are obviously past that timeline and to be 100% honest, we kind of didn't plan very well on our end for that date."
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