News astuce NieR Automata: An Unknown Secret Area! The ultimate mystery of the game discovered?
Published on 07/27/2022 at 19:34
As its Nintendo Switch reissue is fast approaching, the cult NieR: Automata continues to fascinate players, who thought they knew everything about Yoko Tarō’s famous creation. The latest discovery of the community is, for once, very mysterious… until the reaction of its producer.
NieR:Automata has he really revealed all his secrets? More than five years after its initial publication on PC et PlayStation 4and 3 months from his arrival on Nintendo Switch in his long-awaited “The End of YoRHa Edition”, PlatinumGames’ cult title (also available on Xbox One) is still being talked about. This time, it’s a hitherto undiscovered area that has surfaced and is inflaming the communities, to the point of eliciting an equally enigmatic reaction from a fairly high-ranking game development official…
Summary
- NieR:Automata’s ultimate secret, for real?
- A hidden area that ignites the networks
- How to access the secret area of the Duplicated City?
- A mystery maintained by the producer of the game!
NieR:Automata’s ultimate secret, for real?
Has the duplicated City revealed all its secrets?
A year and a half ago, the famous modder Lance MacDonald put an end to the suspense by revealing un cheat code which Yoko Tarō, the famous designer of the Drakengard/NieR universe, was acclaiming at the time. Echoing his “teasing” de mars 2018 concerning “something no one (had) yet discovered”, il congratulated the author of the find and hinted that we were done with the mysteries of NieR:Automata, who no longer held any secrets for anyone. At least, that’s what we believed until the end of July 2022, more than 5 years after the initial release of the title edited by Square Enix…
Was NieR:Automata’s ultimate secret really the last?
A hidden area that ignites the networks
Obviously, an unexpected twist had to happen, and as often, it was once relayed by MacDonald that this surprising discovery made its way onto the web. In the chapter “The duplicated city” (known as “Copied City” and famous for its minimalist architecture in shades of gray) would indeed be a secret door that no one had ever found since the game was released in March 2017:
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 pic.twitter.com/g7W4JxiNDg
— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) July 25, 2022
The enigma, however, goes back two months already, when a certain sadfutago then posted on Reddit a very strange “How do I get to the church?”, initially intriguing his interlocutors not seeing what he was talking about, apart from potentially a church removed from the final version of the game (we will come back to this below). If the question has remained unanswered for some time, the video excerpt published later by the author, 4 minutes long and much more complete, provoked many more reactions, as evidenced by the comments of the YouTube video that reuploaded it:
There seems to be no doubt here: there is indeed an entire hidden area, even including a short cutscene, and containing potential references to previous Yoko Tarō titles such as Dragonguard 3 where the NieR original from 2010. Is the body of the young woman with the black flower that of Yonah? What is this strange black entity made of floating cubes? So many unanswered questions, which even the “pod” of A2 seems unable to answer, in an exchange dubbed and subtitled which suggests that this sequence is authentic.
The strange church contains two more mysteries in a game that has it all.
Furthermore, as mentioned above, the questions around this church also date from 2018, when a post Reddit reported a duplicate version of the City, found in the game files, with many visuals and which would include a church – perhaps the one sadfutago suddenly referred to 4 years later? However, this does not explain why or how its access was revealed in July 2022, nor if all this is not ultimately the work of a very talented modder…
That’s an excellent question! The real problem here is that no one really knows what to do, except activate a QTE against the wall of the church with the character of A2. It is indeed possible to travel with A2 to the Duplicate City from the elevator accessible from the cave of the Ruined City, just before accessing the tower (at the beginning of chapter 17 of the route C). The problem is that sadfutago remains to this day the only player to have seen this QTE appear at this specific place in the game!
Firstly, players believed in a very elaborate hoax in mod form, the game is indeed available on PC. However, several problems arise: sadfutago captured this footage from his PS4, the modding community of the game seems to agree on the impossibility of designing such a complex mod, and the “datamining” (roughly, the exploration of the game code) did not allow to find anything concrete on this subject! MacDonald himself insisted on confirming this :
It is not yet possible to mod NieR:Automata like this, in case you want to know if it is fake.
A coherent theory has meanwhile surfaced: that secret door, leading inside the Church of the Duplicated City, would only be accessible on version 1.0 of the game, namely an un-updated disc version. Therefore, we tried to access it by reinstalling the game without updating it from a “day one” disc version taken from the version steel book : even by going to the concerned area, to the precise place where the QTE “
” is supposed to appear, nothing happens:
Even in version 1.0, we couldn’t find the strange QTE on the Copied City wall…
A mystery maintained by the producer of the game!
The case would already have had trouble stopping there; however, to make matters worse, Twitter gave us the surprising reaction of Yosuke Saito, one of the thinking heads of the NieR franchise, closely linked to PlatinumGames as well as the publisher Square Enix. The game’s producer cracked a simple “Eternal mystery…” quoting MacDonald’s tweet, which can only maintain the legend!
Unfortunately, for his part, the director Yoko Tarō did not publish any reaction on this subject, although fans of the saga (and of this type of fascinating enigma in the world of video games) are hoping for a potential explanation from the man most likely to hold the truth about this strange mystery, one more in a title legendary which is definitely not lacking.
And you, have you tried to unlock this secret and gain access to the mysterious area of Copied City?
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