Bungie has given Destiny 2’s buggiest gun an amazing easter egg
In the long and inglorious history of bugged PC gear, I’m not sure there has ever been a weapon so notoriously prone to fuckery as Destiny 2’s Telesto. The intended function of this exotic fusion rifle is to spew out multiple bolts of void energy that explode after a short delay. Working correctly, it looks like Barney the Dinosaur being hit by a pipe bomb and a great weapon for clearing waves of trash mobs. Telesto, however, has rarely worked correctly.
In its time, the weapon has been responsible for instantly regenerating player abilities, creating infinite heavy ammo, doubling its own damage, and even generating one-second supers. It’s also been responsible for multiple game-crashing glitches, and has had to be disabled multiple times by Bungie while another band-aid fix was applied. There is even a website called Telesto Report that is dedicated to how long it’s been since Telesto last broke the game, which until today had logged 38 different instances of Telesto-related shenanigans.
That number looked set to hit 39 when, following the hotfix that was applied just before the weekly reset, Telesto began—and I kid you not—smoking and sparking as if it really were broken. More problematically, its purple bolts now just drifted off into the air without tracking to enemies. It really seemed that Telesto had stopped giving any shits whatsoever, and we once again bugged to merry hell. However, in a twist that I probably should have seen coming considering how flavourful it all seemed, this ‘bug’ is actually an easter egg tribute to Telesto’s infamous reputation.
As reported by Destiny Bulletin, if you hold reload the player character will slam the side of the gun with their fist, after which Telesto will work properly. Below you can see it in its starting broken state.
And now watch me give it a slap to fix it, after which it fires properly.
I’ve reached out to Bungie as a matter of form, but there’s no way this isn’t a deliberate tribute. I’ve also already seen a couple of joy suckers on Twitter complain that the developers should prioritise fixing [insert hobby horse] rather than adding this kind of frippery, but that fundamentally misunderstands that 1) the art team are not the ones working on PvP connection issues and 2) videogames are supposed to be fun so it’s okay to make fun stuff. Anyway, as a card-carrying member of the Telesto fan club, I love this little sprinkle of extra flavour. And hey, who’s to say Telesto hasn’t broken something behind the scenes…
