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Nier: Automata’s secret church mystery: chaos, community, and an amazing modThe hunt for a secret that didn’t exist
The hunt for a secret that didn’t exist
Scrolling through Twitter, Daniel Griffiths' interest was piqued when he saw a post describing a mysterious phenomenon being shared in theNier: Automatacommunity: A2 opening a hidden door in The Copied City and strolling into a secret, never-before-seen area. Curious, he decided to pursue more knowledge, and landed in theNiermodding Discord server.
Like him, many other Nier: Automata players who caught wind of the phenomenon sat upright - metaphorically and perhaps literally - and flocked to both Reddit and Discord to check out what exactly was up with the secret area. It was dubbed the “church mystery” or “sadfutago’s posts”, among other monikers.
In a time when information is at the very tips of our fingers, where even a badly worded, vague Google Search can lead to the results we want, a mystery has an irresistible allure. It’s hard to accurately capture the phenomenon around a mystery after-the-fact, after the dust has settled and an answer plopped in our laps. The basic charm of a mystery is its ever-shifting, amorphous form - the next piece of information or the next comment can rapidly change the situation. It’s difficult to capture the back-and-forth rapid pings of inside jokes, rapport, the bunking and debunking of theories; the sheer speed of organic theorycrafting.
NieR:Automata Game of the YoRHA Edition | Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
NieR:Automata Game of the YoRHA Edition | Launch Trailer
This is all to say, no matter what is documented here, nothing can come quite close to the experience of refreshing the Reddit page for the latest sadfutago update or snorting at clever, tongue-in-cheek, fresh-off-the-stove memes. And there are other limitations: some discussions on Discord, for example, where most of the technical side of the church mystery hunt occured, took place in unrecorded voice chats. Discord’s terrible search function also, unfortunately, makes it challenging to review past info. So consider this an oral history, in a very loose manner, more than a full recreation of what went down.
June 18: Beginnings
Anonymous Reddit user: “Personally, I was inclined to believe it was a PR stunt, as marketing has always been word-of-mouth for Nier anyway.”
Foxy: “The theory that I had throughout the entire thing was actually a legit teaser. The weirdness from Yoko Taro and Yosuke Saito, to the strangely in-depth lore pieces and references, from Devola’s and Popola’s staff in the church room, to ‘Zinnia.’ All of these things felt extremely accurate and legit.”
Daniel Griffiths: “Honestly at the beginning I had no idea what to think.”
“That’s what we wanted,” Devolas said, in regards to users asking for more proof. I connected with the people known as Devolas, RaiderB, Woeful over Discord in August, almost a month after the hunt for the church took off like a firework and, subsequently, exploded brilliantly. They are the talented trio behind the church mystery, the mod - yes, a mod! - that sparked endless speculation. It started, they tell me, as a way to troll the modding server, but blew up into a phenomenon far beyond what the trio expected.
Woeful is a long-time modder, starting with map/scenario editors in Age Of Empires, and eventually using Creation Engine for models inFalloutgames andSkyrim. But Nier: Automata is the first time Woeful really dove in deep and made his own modding tools. Woeful’s entry into Nier: Automata’s scene was actually due to a single object. “I noticed the Lunar Tear cosmetic accessory looks awfully 2D, which annoyed me,” Woeful told me. “So I started googling to see if I could edit the model.”
Devolas met Woeful through the Nier modding server back in January 2022. He hadn’t modded before, but, after finishing Nier: Automata, spontaneously decided to look up tools for modding. In January, Woeful was working on map modding tools - something that wasn’t available in the Nier modding community yet - and posessed a near-finished project. It was then that Devolas proposed that they add a little mini-church before releasing Woeful’s tools.
RaiderB joined in June 2022. Before Woeful and Devolas came up with the church plan, Woeful had already given RaiderB map modding tools. RaiderB knew there was some sort of secret Woeful and Devolas were concocting, but was not aware of the details. He actually planned to release his own mod that would remove all invisible walls from the game, but Woeful and Devolas asked him to hold back. “Eventually I felt bad and told him what the secret was, and he ended up joining and helping us,” Devolas said.
July 25: Momentum
In a follow-up to the June 18 post, sadfutagoposted more of the church on July 25, and this time it wasn’t shaky handheld footage. It showed A2 traveling through never-before-seen hallways with structure sticking out of the sides. But the church mystery videos Devolas posted under the moniker sadfutago didn’t immediately blow up. “The Reddit posts barely had over 10 upvotes initially, and the first video we posted just got 100 upvotes and died for a month,” Devolas said.
That all changed when Lance McDonald, a well-known PS4 modding personality on Twitter and YouTube,tweeted outthe July 25 video. McDonaldclaimed that"It’s not yet possible to mod Nier Automata in this way", lending credence to the theory that it was indeed an actual secret area in the game.
A very incomplete list of things people did in the quest to access the church:Brainstorm together collectively over Discord chat in the Nier modding Discord (makes sense)Delete Terraria and Far Cry 6to free up hard drive space to record footage of looking for the church that did not existBuyall three PS4 versionsto look for the church that did not exist in each of them
This was the “oh, shit” moment for Woeful. “When Lance McDonald found the whole thing and made his post on Twitter,” Woeful said. “The amount of views/likes/retweets it started getting made me so giddy and absolutely inspired all of us, I think, to continue working and trying to make it bigger and better.”
“After Lance’s tweet, the videos on Reddit and all the posts started to blow up and it began to trend,” Devolas added. Following the viral circulation of the church mystery, Nier: Automata producer Yosuke Saito and creator Yoko Taro posted some seemingly-cryptic tweets. Saito commented “Eternal Mystery”, while Taro wryly gave no insight when asked about the church mystery, and instead followed up with, “I love sausage and beer.”
These enigmatic tweets set the Nier: Automata community ablaze even further, stoking the speculation in the communities on Reddit and Discord. “Once Yoko and Yosuke commented on it, people thought it was definitely an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) or some kind of official content,” Devolas said. From there, players were off to the races. They were armed with the determination to yank open the church door.
Theories
Everybody had a theory, but there were three main camps: 1) sadfutago was telling the truth and this secret church door was actually in some super specific version of the game; 2) sadfutgao was lying and was secretly Square Enix PR, concocting an elaborate marketing campaign for some future Nier release; 3) sadfutago was lying, and the church mystery was actually a mod created with tools the widespread modding community hadn’t seen yet.
Threaded in-between sadfutago’s posts were memes and community creations of the highest quality. The theories were fun, yes. But the memes? Almost too good.
Captainspended: Made a video of 2Bfinding the church door in Garry’s Mod. Modding that moment into other games was a format that became popular, a way to find the door in spirit when you couldn’t in reality. “My guess is that sadfutago’s first video of opening the church door became an iconic moment,” Captainspended said. “That was when like 90% of players, including me, attempted to open the door and became clowns.”
Daniel Griffiths:Re-created the church area in Unity. On the Discord server, Griffiths encountered meowsandstuff, a user who was recreating the church area in Blender, and was inspired to import their church model into Unity. It took Griffiths around four to five hours to import other models, tweak lighting, as well as a basic recreation of the hacking minigame he’d made previously.
Then again, the placement of the church made a lot of sense. “It’s in a place you never need to visit as A2 and the only thing there is a room full of infinite enemies,” Griffiths said. “If the game was going to have one last secret, that would be the place to hide it. And the fact that Yoko Taro and Yosuke Saito played along on Twitter only made things even more confusing.”
“My favorite was that, among the 3 main theories, all were equally unlikely,” RaiderB told me. “It couldn’t be real because there were no files in the game for the church. It was very unlikely to be a mod, because map modding and especially quest scripting was at that point not possible. And a PR stunt wouldn’t make sense because of the first posts from sadfutago and the low probability of it going viral. So whatever theory you went with there was no safe bet.”
July 25 - July 29: Chaos And…
Here’s where the timeline of events becomes really hard to track, because of the speed at which everything evolved. I consulted Foxy’s very handy compendiumThe Story of Sad[F]utago - A NieR Community Hunt for a Church, combined with personal notes, and lots of Reddit scrolling.
When the ZE32 Zinnia posts went up, any belief that sadfutago was a hapless Canadian teenager went out the window. These posts were intentional. The question now was: For what purpose? At this point, people were starting to speculate if there might be an entirely new Nier title (or, perhaps, Drakengard?) about to be announced officially, instead of, as some people previously believed, Switch promotions.
July 29: Endings
Near the end, the prevailing attitude on Reddit was that the church mystery was likely “official content” of some sort, but regardless of the outcome, most people had enjoyed the ride. It was around then that Devolas decided to end things with a since-deleted Twitch livestream, revealing that the church mystery had been a mod all along.
Postmortem
The mod was surprisingly challenging to make. “On a technical side, literally everything is hard and iffy with the game engine,” Woeful explained. “The things we found the Platinum devs did were bizarre and sometimes finding something as small as a sound effect could take an entire day. Anyone on the server or who has touched the engine can testify to it never playing along and always being wack. Luckily most of the big parts of the map tools I had finished months (and some years) prior, so we focused more on the scripting and getting things looking nice.”
The fact that thousands of eyeballs followed every one of sadfutago’s new posts was also a challenge, Woeful said. The team put together “new” sadfutago content on the fly, knowing one mistake could abruptly end the mystery.
