Someone claims to have found the Sleeper Simulant in Destiny's newest expansion The Taken King, the game's most sought-after weapon and the subject of countless theories.
Players on reddit's DestinyTheGame subreddit have explored hidden rooms, dismantled Exotic engrams and all manner of fully infused and upgraded Exotic weapons and armor in hopes that one of them would yield a secret not unlike how the dismantling of the Black Hammer from Year One revealed clues for the new Black Spindle Exotic sniper rifle.
Today, a player named Bryntfire posted a video of the Sleeper Simulant, claiming that a group of four other players on a Facebook group that they're a part of had each acquired the weapon.
The weapon screen looks like that of any other weapon in the game, down to its perks. There's a perk called "Midnight Exigent" that increases the bounce count of the weapon's projectile to 5, for example.
It looks legit at first glance, but not everyone is convinced because they aren't sharing how they acquired the weapon, nor have they posted any actual gameplay videos of the weapon in action.
The highest voted reddit user in the thread, dxniele, points out that it almost had them fooled "except for the fact that the blurred curved lines behind the weapon are still and when you inspect a weapon in-game the curved lines rotate in a circle."
Upon closer inspection by yours truly, the circles in the background certainly rotate in the game, that I checked. The ones in the video? Not so much.
Another user, ithilis points out that anyone working in digital animation and visual effects, like he does, could have whipped up a similar fake in After Effects or Nuke in just a "couple of hours."
"The paralax motion would be simple to create using a 3D camera and null objects attached to the layers," they write.
They point out that the people who "discovered" the weapon could have used the following high-resolution image of the Sleeper Simulant to produce the convincing fake.
We can chalk it up as a fake and return to the hunt.
