Nier: Automata 'secret church' mystery leads to mod tools and memes

rockpapershotgun.com:

For several weeks, a Nier: Automata player has caused intrigue and excitement by posting mysterious images and videos from an area no one had seen before. Was it a secret area? An unfinished area? A hoax? A mod? If it was a mod, it was far more complex than any so far. Turns out, that's because a group of fans have secretly been making their own mod tools, and plan to release them soon. In the meantime, I've enjoyed pranksters memeing on the mystery by creating secret churches in other games, including Half-Life 2 and Super Mario 64.

As a Reddit thread recaps in detail, a Reddit poster named "sadfutago" has been trickling facets of an increasingly large mystery since June. They talked about a secret door through the back of Automata's Adam boss fight in the beautiful whitebox city, leading to a church. Then they started posting videos getting into the area, and videos exploring it, and videos fighting a mysterious big baddie in it. This was all quite confusing.

While no one else was able to find any such area, making a hoax seemed likely, the videos looked very convincingly Nier. But Nier: Automata has no official mod support or tools, so mods have not got far beyond substituting models and textures—certainly not adding giant new things. But it would've been a huge effort to recreate all this outside the game. So what was it? In a Twitch livestream today, a team revealed this was in-game, made using unofficial mod tools which they have created and plan to release soon.

"We have been loving all the discussions and theories - it has been an amazing journey," a message from the team said in the stream. "It has been inspiring to see the community come together after so many years, it has made all the hard work well worth it.