A small bit of excitement gripped the Nier fandom as someone posted on Reddit that they stumbled into a secret room in NieR:Automata containing unfinished assets. Here's the important bits compiled in a twitter thread.

If this is a fake, it's a very elaborate one, with a couple new videos included just last night/this morning.

One of the Producers, Yosuke Saito, is playing coy about this video, making me think it is real, but whether it's someone stumbling onto unfinished assets in an old review copy, guerilla marketing for another NieR project, or something else is an open question.

I'm with VB on this one, I don't think it's real. This video evidence grows day to day, but if it were real why not just show it all at once instead of drip feeding for view farming?

https://twitter.com/VoidBurger/status/1552523877170946048

huh, this seems cool albeit having a chance that it could be fake...

but it could also be real.... hmmm... 🤔 what a headscratcher. 😅

I side with Jess as well for the same reasons. No one has been able to verify this and the poster has been dolling out videos in small chunks rather than in a single continuous video which seems suspect.

The question whether its real or not is not nearly as interesting as how it came to be in the first place. Lance who knows his way around fiddling with the insides of games has said that while it's pretty obvious this isn't something you can just find on a typical retail disc of Nier Automata, also stated he has no idea how it was made. The simple act of panning the camera is currently not something any modder knows how to do and a lot of it has to do with Automata running on a proprietary engine.

So yah, the whole thing is obviously staged, but it's fascinating how.

How are people defining real and fake? I do not think a fan modified the game to make this. It's either in the game code legitimately, or the developer themselves made it. I would define that as very real either way, but I do think this is all staged as part of some kind of marketing campaign. Really cool and unique however it plays out

I would take "fake" to mean that this area is not accessible to any regular player like you or me, by ordinary or even extraordinary means.

And that's what I think this is. The secret room is not really in the game. If it is, players could use tools like Cheat Engine to warp the character or camera beyond the "door" to see it. I've had to do that in a game after I accidentally sequence broke myself out of a locked room and had already overwritten the save.

This is an age of datamining there's no way something like this would go hidden in games these days, I don't think. So this is absolutely a staged thing leading....to something. I'm not entirely sure to what end though.

turns out it was all a marketing / hype push for some fan made modding platform thingy :

In the "this is fake" scenario is there really a good reason to assume it's even in the Nier engine? At some point I think it would just be easier to create this in a different engine with assets ripped from the real thing. Other possibilities are that it just is someone familiar with the proprietary engine (I'm sure many hands were involved in that) *or* someone who is just decent at reverse engineering (it's not like the mod scene has exclusive claim over all talent in that field).

EDIT: just saw the post from Splodge linking to the truth. I wasn't right about it being in another engine; basically the idea that nobody can do something unknown to the mod community is deeply flawed...

In these sorts of discussions, "real" and "fake" are usually used synonymously with "legitimate" and "illegitimate", the context for legitimacy based on whatever the source is claiming. In this instance, source claimed to have found a new secret area never before uncovered, and given that the truth of it is that it's actually the result of new modding tools, this was not legitimate, and in that case falls under the bracket of fake.

You can get into the weeds and have a semantic discussion around the notion that it technically is a new area never before uncovered, since it was created by a user after the game came out, but that's not the intended meaning of how source presented this, which was quite clearly "anybody know what this unused content from the game is?".

It's the same sort of discussion as when talking about forged art, or knock-off sunglasses. Yes, the item exists, it is a real and tangible thing that someone can interact with, but it is not the legitimate thing that the source is trying to pass it off as. In short, it is fake.

I'm glad the modding community now have a way to add actual content to the game, rather than just model swaps and asset mods, but I am always bothered when something is shown off as mysterious when the truth is much more benign. Misinformation and misleading statements are part of what make the internet horrible to use, but your mileage may vary on that.

@quantris: Yup turns out it's a bunch of new modding tools after all.

A lot of people who should have known better were hyping this up unreasonably.

@magnetphonics: Typical Nier fans

.... I kid I kid please don't hurt me

So I'll take this as my cue to not replay the game.