Cyberpunk 2077 contains a hidden, (mostly) fan-solved mystery that its sequel will have a hard time living up to. Cyberpunk is known for its plethora of sidequests; from one-off encounters with strangers on the street to city-spanning mini-epics almost worthy of a game of their own, there’s a lot to get lost in outside the main story.
And while we know there’s a Cyberpunk sequel in the works, we know relatively little about it. Many fans have already started putting together their wishlists, coming up with all manner of things they’d like to see added, changed, or removed from the base game. Although its exploration has often been criticized for lacking depth, there was at least one fascinating mystery hidden beneath the surface of Cyberpunk 2077 – and its sequel will have a difficult time organically creating something similar.
What Was Cyberpunk’s FF:06:B5 2.01 Mystery & How It Was Solved
Cyberpunk’s Worst-Kept Secret
FF:06:B5 was the name given to a sort of in-game mystery that players discovered, discussed, and subsequently solved within Cyberpunk 2077 (with a short detour to The Witcher 3). It played out almost like an in-game ARG, with cryptic clues spread out throughout both games, aimed at sparking curiosity and conversations between players that would eventually lead to a solution.
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The seeds of the FF:06:B5 mystery were planted a long time ago, when players discovered that a series of unusual statues, hidden throughout Night City, all bore the inscription FF:06:B5. Although many claimed this was simply a mistake, or a meaningless detail, others insisted that the statues had too much in common for it to be unintentional. They were often surrounded by Bhikku monks, and were almost all oriented in similar directions.
But the search began in earnest with the release of Cyberpunk‘s 2.0 update. When players logged in after downloading the update, they discovered a new location: a rundown old church secreted away in the Biotechnica Protein Farms. Heading inside, they found a laptop containing several messages between two users, Polyhistor and Tyromanta, who are themselves trying to solve FF:06:B5.
Tyromanta claims to have first encountered the cryptic sequence in a game that’s “over 60 years old,” and believes his safety is compromised as a result. He encourages Polyhistor to look into it, too. The final message ends with Polyhistor expressing the same concern, celebrating his breakthrough as he prepares to spread the word to his friends in Night City.
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Many players dismissed this as yet another cute, but ultimately meaningless Cyberpunk Easter egg. But some decided to make an earnest attempt to solve the mystery. In short order, another player discovered a laptop discarded in a landfill, its screen covered in characters from the Glagolitic alphabet used in The Witcher 3.
The Glagolitic script is a real, historic Slavic alphabet – it was just used in The Witcher 3 for flavor.
It took some time and sustained collaboration by multiple players to solve this clue. In the meantime, another group of players were focused on a different detail found in Polyhistor’s church hideout: an arcade game called Arasaka Tower 3D.
Arasaka Tower 3D can only be played inside the abandoned church. It’s a Wolfenstein-inspired first-person shooter game, in which you play as Johnny Silverhand during his legendary raid of Arasaka Tower, fighting your way to the exit before a bomb goes off and takes the whole thing down.
Beyond its location, multiple factors connect Arasaka Tower 3D to FF:06:B5 – first, one of the high scores is held by a user named “PLHSTR,” who earned a score of FF06B5; the game also contains numerous secrets, hidden behind unassuming walls. This is a reference to the pushwalls used to hide secret rooms in the original Wolfenstein 3D, but also ties back to Polyhistor’s mention of “a door that we took for a wall,” referenced in a diary entry found in the abandoned church.
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Most of the secrets are fairly innocuous, although a few of them do tie back into the mystery in surface-level ways: some rooms contain low-res recreations of the FF:06:B5 statue that sparked this whole mystery, while others contain numbers – other players’ high scores – etched into the walls. Some rooms even have magenta columns, which is what FF:06:B5 points to when used as a hexadecimal color code.
Eventually, players discovered that you could access a secret area – level -10 – by entering certain other areas within a server room in a particular order. The area functioned as a giant keypad; you were expected to enter Spider Murphy’s high score by walking around the room as if there were hidden buttons on the floor.
Level -10 contained numerous secrets of its own, including a QR code that led to an unwinnable game of Tic-Tac-Toe, and messages on the walls reading “It sees you.“
Once this level was completed, a cable running from the arcade cabinet to the mainframe would be powered on, allowing you to enter numerical codes into newly-activated keypads. For a while, players struggled to determine the codes with the evidence they’d been given; some were able to solve them through trial and error.
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At this point, you could unlock a unique monster truck, the Demiurge, which led many players to declare the mystery solved. You’d also see a mysterious cutscene, and find some new messages from Polyhistor that would reveal what was really going on – Polyhistor, Tyromanta, and, ultimately, V, too, had become part of a search for a mysterious entity whom Polyhistor calls a “watcher.”
They were able to become self-aware of their own existence as characters in a video game.
It’s commonly theorized that the “watcher” is a game dev, or even the player. The characters speak of them like a god – apparently, by discovering a secret area in a video game representation of their world, they were able to become self-aware of their own existence as characters in a video game.
But there was still something missing – how could we bridge the gap from the secret room in Arasaka Tower 3D to the mainframe codes? They certainly weren’t intended to be brute forced, not after all these hints and clues. Thankfully, a real solution was still forthcoming – and it’d be hidden in an entirely different game.
How The Witcher 3 Helped Solve FF:06:B5
The Velen Connection
Shortly thereafter, CD Projekt Red – developer of Cyberpunk 2077 – released a seemingly unrelated project. It was the next-gen update for The Witcher 3, free to all players who already owned the game on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. Now with 4K textures, ray tracing support, and a couple of new items inspired by The Witcher Netflix series, it encouraged many Cyberpunk players to dive back into the world of The Witcher 3, where they found the final key to solving the FF:06:B5 mystery.
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Hidden within the Destroyed Bastion in Velen was a puzzle that players could solve to access a secret area. Within that area was the mural pictured above – a glyph of sorts that players were ultimately able to decode and convert into the passwords needed to activate the mainframe and lead to the final cutscene.
I won’t get into the minutiae involved in solving this cipher, but you can consult Dangerous_Grounds’ original Reddit post above for the details if you’re into that sort of thing.
Cyberpunk 2077 2 Faces A Challenge If It Wants To Top This
FF:06:B5 Is Unparalleled
As a hidden sidequest, FF:06:B5 was ingenious in how it broke the barriers of game design, forcing external player collaboration over multiple years. It also perfectly suits the Cyberpunk setting with its conspiratorial thinking and technological existentialism. The way clues were dispensed, along with the sheer number of dead ends, mean parts of the mystery still remain unsolved today.
If you followed along as it unfolded, each new reveal and solution was thrilling, forcing you to immerse yourself more deeply in the world of Night City as you hunted for clues of your own. The way the initial denial faded into awe as we collectively realized the statue inscriptions weren’t just another glitch, or a meaningless developer in-joke, was something no other game has ever achieved before or since.
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It’s almost inevitable that Cyberpunk‘s sequel will attempt something similar, but I can’t imagine it’ll reach the same heights. For one thing, a much larger portion of players are aware of the existence of FF:06:B5 now – they’ll be looking for tiny details like this one as soon as the game drops, and anything that even remotely resembles a clue will be dissected to death. It’ll suck a lot of the fun out of any mystery CDPR attempted.
Even if it is well-thought-out and unique, the successor to FF:06:B5 won’t live up to the excitement of the original. So, quite honestly, I think the best (and funniest) thing CDPR can do in Cyberpunk‘s sequel is to avoid any kind of FF:06:B5-level hidden sidequest. I want them to leave us meaningless riddles, pointless details, breadcrumb trails that lead nowhere, but keep us endlessly guessing about the possibility of another mystery.
It’d avoid any kind of disappointment in the sequel being worse than the original, and it’d retroactively cast doubt on the original mystery in an amusing and setting-appropriate way. Skipping the ARG this time is really the only way for Cyberpunk 2077‘s sequel to avoid unfavorable comparisons to the original – as much as I’ll miss the experience of solving FF:06:B5, the game will be better off that way.
Source: Dangerous_Grounds/Reddit
Cyberpunk 2077
8/10
- Released
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December 10, 2020
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs and Alcohol
- Engine
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REDengine 4
- Cross-Platform Play
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ps, xbox, pc
- Cross Save
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yes
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