Thread by @manfightdragon

Someone randomly posted a video on the Nier Automata subreddit showing they found a secret room in the Copied City. So far no one else has worked out how they managed to make this secret door appear. Literally 1 person on earth has accessed this room and we are uttered mind blown

This has been an ongoing mystery for over a month since this person just randomly posted “why can’t my friend access the church?”. Today they finally posted a video of what they were talking about and the community is in shambles over this discovery.

It’s not yet possible to mod Nier Automata in this way, if anyone is curious if this is fake.

Some people are asking if this could be the “final secret” of Automata that Yoko Taro hinted at a few years ago. The “final secret” was already discovered (by me) a while ago, the Japanese Nier twitter account confirmed it at the time. I made a video about it here:

https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/1345964287496343552

The user has posted a follow-up video showing the secret area in far more detail. It features an unseen cutscene on top of everything else. The voice-over used is recycled from elsewhere in the game. The game also for some reason has the "item" and "door" arrow prompts disabled.

Note: you can not disable the small arrows that are meant to float above items and doors by normal means in NieR Automata, but they are disabled in this video somehow.

When the player first enters the church, something rectangular floats up and away from the window sill.

The person who posted this on Reddit just accidentally posted a comment under their main account pretending to be a bystander. No idea HOW they made this video still but it's clearly not what they say it is, they're lying about the situation.

This person makes a good point. I don't even know what to think anymore. I'm dying here.

https://twitter.com/SailsSez/status/1552130410850799617?s=20&t=pX3knwduI3hbv-LS4E1b9g

A new video has been posted where the player opens the locked chest in the room, revealing new storyline elements and an encounter with a new enemy. None of these assets exist on any known datamined build of the game across PC or PS4 and can't be replicated by known modders yet.

I was mistaken about it being completely new assets, the blob of storyline text that appears after opening the chest does actually exist and is used elsewhere in the retail version of the game.

By the way, you can't just put a non-final build of a game into a PS4 and play it. The "Red and white" review discs for Nier Automata are all USA build 1.00, same as Day 1 edition. If you get a <1.00 disc you have to play it in a testkit. Can't even play it on a jailbroken system

A new video has been posted showing that after defeating the weird enemy, the player can interact with a bird bath, an asset which has been ported over from the game Nier Replicant, including the same questions that need to be answered in that game. He answers incorrectly.

The creator of the video has now just posted a static image with the caption "Z" making it quite clear at this point that this is just a fan having some fun with the community, showing off their bleeding edge modding skills.

They're still posting images, with captions slowly spelling out "Zero" (the name of the protagonist from Dragon-on Dragoon 3). So the entire pretence under which this whole thing started is no longer applicable to reality and this is not content others can unlock.

The user continued posting screenshots showing assets from Dragon-on Dragoon 3 ported to the NieR Automata engine, just accompanied by sequential numbers.

Another image was posted with the caption "zinnia" showing more assets from Drakengard 3 imported. Whoever created this is able to to things in the NieR Automata engine that no one has ever publicly shown themselves to be able to do before outside of Platinum Games.

The person who posted the NieR secret church content has updated their Reddit profile with a link reading twitch.tv/ze34_zinnia/

The user has updated their Reddit biography to say "Not an ARG, not Official" in Japanese. They also made a few mistranslations into Japanese along the way before settling on this version.

The creator of the NieR "secret church" content went live on twitch and broadcasted footage of themselves playing through a lengthy new scenario taking place in both new and existing areas in before thanking the mod developers for their work and community for the hype

The stream ended with a very heartfelt thankyou to the community, highlighting a lot of the best hype moments across social media and mainstream news websites, and a light hearted apology for any potential frustration along the way.

The broadcast clarified that everything shown was in-engine, and indeed was the work of extremely talented modders doing things the community though were not possible.

I was not involved in this, as you can probably tell by the combination of how confused and how wrong I was about various aspects of this along the way (I was huffing the 'drakengard 3 remake' copium by the end)