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There’s a very good reason PlatinumGames went with so many different possible endings in Nier Automata: Their publisher, Square Enix, straight up told them the game needed more stuff.
Nier Automata director Yoko Taro and producer Yosuke Saito sat down for a Square Enix interview recently to celebrate the Nier series’ 15-year anniversary, and they talked about all sorts of stuff, including the fact that Taro slipped the original game’s save-deleting ending right past Saito.
At one point in the interview, the duo was asked why Nier Automata has so many endings. The game has a whopping 26 endings, which isn’t anywhere near the amount seen in games like Baldur’s Gate 3, but it still quite a lot for an action-RPG.
Taro’s response was simple: “That’s an idea that we brought over from Drakengard. And the reason we did it is that Square Enix told us to ‘add more content!'”
It’s hard to imagine Nier Automata not having a plethora of endings, and it’s interesting that, from what it sounds like, Platinum submitted an earlier build of the game that originally had fewer of them, only to be told to go back and add more.
In much more depressing Yoko Taro news, in a recent interview the acclaimed visionary said he’s worried that game devs will lose jobs to AI and could be “treated like bards” in 50 years, although Danganronpa mastermind Kazutaka Kodaka argued that the tech still can’t act like a real creator. One can only hope.