Update: While the speculation, theorizing, and data mining was fun while it lasted, Bungie now says there is nothing to see here - the images and audio are merely hype for the launch of the Beyond Light expansion. Sorry, folks.

Original story here:

One of the reasons Destiny 2 has lasted so long as a service game is that it regularly surprises the community with weird puzzles and ARGs. We don't know what the latest one, announced today, will look like, but rest assured that the brainchild of the guardian deity is already working on the case.

Players are hard at work trying to decipher a mysterious distress signal currently being broadcast on Twitter. The messages are static and almost inaudible, but the Raid Secrets subreddit is attempting to decipher the hidden meanings within them using reverse audio playback, spectrographic images, and pattern recognition.

Here's the clip:

It certainly sounds like there's something there, and to my (admittedly not good) ears, the reversed audio track makes it even clearer that someone is saying something.

Raid Secrets moderator HopFright said that the group is working on getting an audio recording or, failing that, confirmation from the Destiny community team that there is in fact nothing to see here.

De1irium, an attentive listener, stated in a Reddit comment that he heard "this is" at around the 4 second mark and "the frequency" at around the 23 second mark. However, others say they heard Slayer say "join us" when Hell Awaits was played backwards.

This seems like a good theory to me, but it leads Destiny 2 players to the last in-game event before the launch of Beyond Light on November 10. An emblem called the "Calamity Protocol" has been data-mined and its source is listed as an "End-of-Season event," so the guess is that just as Rasputin could be seen shooting the Almighty out of the sky in June, this is also world building and setting the stage for the story to come.

As for who is speaking in the stills, most likely it is Exo Stranger, Varix, and Royal, both of whom play important roles in the story of Beyond Light. This is more than we can talk about in a day.

We'll watch how it unfolds and let you know how it goes.