The Nier: Automata Mod That Fooled the World | IGN Inside Stories

ign.com:

In June 2022, a new Reddit user named SadFutago joined the Nier Automata subreddit to ask what might seem to outsiders a fairly innocuous question: "How do you open the church?"

Their post was short and sweet, seemingly coming from a confused, not-exactly-internet-savvy gamer who wanted to know how to access a building in Nier: Automata that, they claimed, was closed off for their friend, but open for them. The problem? There was no such church in Nier: Automata, to anyone's knowledge. Dataminers had never heard of it. It didn’t exist in any guide, or video, or older build known to anyone in the audience. And as more information, and later images and clips came out of this location no one had ever seen before, the Nier subreddits, Discords, and eventually wider gaming communities went into a frenzy trying to solve the mystery of the never-before-seen church.

SadFutago kicked off a beautiful mess of a multi-month storyline that twisted the community, media, and even expert modders into knots. It eventually bled out of the Nier community it started in, reaching major media sites and mainstream gaming communities. Even Nier creator Yoko Taro himself got involved.

The “church saga” as it came to be known turned out to be an elaborate build-up to announce brand new modding tools for Nier: Automata that stand to revolutionize what modders can do with the game’s world and was largely orchestrated on the fly by three individuals who didn’t go into the saga with any elaborate schemes. They were just regular modders who made some cool stuff, and whose fun tease of the community spiraled far beyond what they had ever intended.

We tracked down the trio of creators behind SadFutago to get the true tale behind the Nier church saga. This