The rollout of the Diablo 2: Resurrected 2.5 patch yesterday appears to have kicked off an ARG where players work to decode numeric strings hidden in the game’s chat lobby.
The fun started with the announcement that the 2.5 patch had gone live, with a strange image at the very bottom, accompanied by the message: “We were flipping through the old Diablo 2 manual [PDF format] and found this confusing inscription… What does all this mean?”
The entire image is very high resolution, so everything in it is clearly visible.
The scribbled text strings in the notebook are the obvious highlight, but Reddit – because it’s always Reddit (opens in new tab)– soon noticed that one coin in the picture is different from the rest. It bears the words “Keep the Core—Resurrected—???? – 2021,” and is also physically identical to the chat gem in the Diablo 2: Resurrected lobby. From there, they found out it was a Vigenère number, and that by using “risen” as a key, the three lines of text scribbled in the notebook translates to “so many gems, what do these orange numbers mean.”
That in itself is not very logical, but of course the pursuit did not end there. Go to the Diablo 2: Resurrected chat lobby and click on the chat gem to activate and deactivate it, and eventually (it may take a while) you will get an orange number. It looks like this.
It took me a solid three minutes of clicking like a devil before that song popped; more diligent fans have compiled macros that automatically click multiple times per second, saving wear and tear on both mouse and finger.
Like old book-based DRM, those numbers – and again, this is completely Reddit figuring it out, I’m terrible at ARGs and can’t take credit – translate to specific words in the Diablo 2 manual. The first three numbers in the sequence indicate where the word in the hidden message will be; the next two are the page number in the manual; the next two are the line number; and the last two are the number of the word. So in my case, for example, 558 13 06 15 means the word ‘new’.
These words are shared in threads on the Diablo (opens in new tab)Diablo 2 (opens in new tab)and Diablo 2: Resurrected (opens in new tab) subreddits, as well as a few Discord servers, and from there to a large Google Docs spreadsheet (opens in new tab), where a detailed record of the work’s progress is kept and a (somewhat) coherent secret message begins to coalesce. Much of the message has already been decoded and is filled with passages such as “It rides east, east to be released by the other two dark stones” and “The shadow of a past light that sparks evil brothers in carries himself.” The verbiage is hard to parse because it’s incomplete and may be out of order, but it sure is terribly diablo.
Interestingly enough, this doesn’t seem to be entirely new. PCGamesN (opens in new tab) recalled a 2021 tweet from original Diablo co-creator David Brevik asking if “the special code for the chat gem” [will] still in Resurrected?” The obvious implication is that some sort of hidden funkiness was also present in the original Diablo 2, which was released in June 2000 – over 20 years ago. That’s an awfully long time for a secret to go undiscovered, but such things are not unprecedented in computer software: this Windows 1.0 Easter egg (opens in new tab) remained untraceable for nearly twice as long before being discovered earlier this year.
Perhaps the most important question of the day. Will the chat gem special code still be in Resurrected? https://t.co/ORFQtKTzWJFebruary 19, 2021
The Diablo Fan Wiki also references secrets hidden in the chat gem in the original Diablo 2, although not specifically to numeric codes. It’s possible that Blizzard is just building on that legend with a new ARG.
Be that as it may, at the moment no one knows where it is all going. It could be a stealth reveal of a new feature – Blizzard does stuff like that (opens in new tab) occasionally – or it could be a deep knowledge that has gone undiscovered for decades. As a more long guess, maybe there’s a big Diablo 4 reveal about to come out, though that seems extremely unlikely to me. It is also possible that the message is not the end at all, but just the next step towards even more, deeper mysteries.
Whatever’s going on, we’ll probably have the answer soon: the Diablo fans are working hard and the hidden message is being decoded quickly.
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