The Nier Automata Church was a clever, entertaining fake.
Earlier this week, we reported on a mysterious church discovered in Nickel: Automata via Reddit posts in the Nuer community. Although no one knew the truth, it was clear that no one could explain what was happening. It has now been proven that this affair was a cleverly constructed fake. We can look at the evidence and piece together the pieces.
The original story is linked above. It shows how someone came to Reddit and then cryptically revealed Nier’s content: Automata. This was a church in the copied town that made numerous references to Nier: Replicants more was shown.
The mask began to fall over the week. Sadfutago stopped playing the role of a child whose mom won’t allow them to upload videos to YouTube via the PlayStation 4. Instead, they started posting strange things, such as giant statue-like models of the Intoners in Drakengard3, apparently ripped from the game’s famous final boss fight.
They captioned the post simply “zinnia,” using the flair “Help,” and continued revealing a Twitch channel connected to Zinnia’s name. They wrote that everything would be revealed within a few hours in Japanese.
The community became more and more sloppy as the countdown to the final finale began. Twitch chat turned into a torrent of ASCII art of Emil’s face. Hundreds of users kept republishing “Become as Gods,” a chant that robots used to savor in an earlier chapter of automata. Most people had by this time realized that this was a fake. But they were mostly just going along with the flow.
You can find the full stream’s VOD here. However, it was revealed that all of it had been created by mods. DevolasRevenge and Woeful_Wolf were the modders. RaiderB also showed the extent of the content created and a video explaining the deception.
Although the group suggested that they planned for a longer reveal, the fact that it had gone so far beyond the boundaries of the Nuer community convinced them not to slow down the timeline.
The video ended with a slide that read, “THANK YOU.” It pointed out that everything in the video was created using mod content tools. These tools were a long-term project that the three men had worked on for many years. They plan to make them available to the public over the next few weeks.
