The truth behind Nier: Automata’s latest secret has finally been revealed – and people are not happy with the outcome.
Over the past several days, the NieR community has been lost in a frenzy over a supposed piece of new, secret content found by a user on Reddit. This user, known as u/sadfutago, would post cryptic messages across the span of the last month, asking for help on getting into an area they called ‘the Church’ – an area not found in NieR: Automata. What followed was a rabbit hole of pictures and videos of this apparent location, complete with several new areas, an introductory sequence and so much more that threw community members for a loop.
If you want to find out more about the original NieR: Automata secret, you can find more in an article we made about the subject on KeenGamer.
Since the initial posts and videos, more theories and more posts were made, with many assuming that these clips were coming from someone high up in the NieR development team or that it was at least someone with a PS4 NieR: Automata developer kit. The reasoning for this is due to the engine used in the NieR games, as it is an in-house engine that is not easily accessible to the public – to add such substantial content would require a vast amount of knowledge and know-how to make convincing. Add onto that the hopes of people wanting another new entry into this series, and that resulted in the current theories.
These desires would only intensify as the days went on, with the postings growing ever more strange as they continued. The most interesting and the thing that made fans the most excited was when u/sadfutago started to post images outside of The Church and instead started posting pictures of a new area with a very familiar figure as the centrepiece. Images contained A Lunar Tear flower (a type of flower very important to most Yoko Taro games) and the figures of the Intoners, characters from Taro’s previous work, Drakengard 3.
Intoner
Further images would expand on this, but this one image alone was enough to drive people into an even further frenzy. Fans have been waiting on some kind of update on the Drakengard series for years, especially as the game has grown its cult classic status due to the success of NieR: Automata, seeing it referenced so blatantly gave many people hope that a new announcement was fast approaching. At this point, many still believed that this was the work of a developer inside of the NieR: Automata team or someone close to it at least, so the hype levels began to rise.
Those dreams were soon crushed when the truth about the secret room and the person behind it came out. This entire ordeal – the room, the cryptic code, everything – was just an elaborate scheme used to showcase a breakthrough in modding and not some new hint at Yoko Taro’s next game.
The u/sadfutago account was actually run by 3 people who were seemingly trying to showcase their skills in modding NieR: Automata, a feat that many would have been significantly impressed by. However, with the way they went about it, it snowballed into a hype train for a product or event that did not exist, with the final nail in the coffin coming during a live stream held by one of the members on Twitch (the link to which was hidden in the cryptic Reddit posts).
The title for the stream was changed to ‘三時間 ARGじゃない Officialじゃな���’ which includes the characters for ‘negation’, meaning that this was not officially endorsed by the NieR team, nor was it part of an ARG.
Reddit user Angzt has been posting an incredibly up-to-date and well-written post about this entire situation on the r/Gaming subreddit, one which contains a lot more information including the step-by-step changes which occurred to u/sadfutago’s account.
Spires and Statues
While it is undeniable that this is an impressive piece of content, and one that has successfully drummed up a lot of publicity for the NieR franchise, it has also left a lot of people annoyed and upset with how it turned out. Many see these events as u/sadfutago stringing along the community for no reason, getting their hopes up for new content and developments when in reality there was nothing. It’s a tricky situation, one not helped by the infamous nature of the game’s director, Yoko Taro, and his tendency to include secrets in his games – for a lot of people in the community, these people seemed to have piggybacked off of this belief in secrets to trick a large portion of the fanbase.
The truth of the secret room in NieR: Automata is that it is simply an impressive piece of mod work that was turned into an ARG, one which tricked an entire community and one which probably made Yoko Taro very, very rich.
SOURCE: U/SADFUTAGO’S REDDIT ACCOUNT
