Eurogamer article summary:
- Nier was born out of Yoko pitching Drakengard 3, and Square wanting to do something different, so ideas were reworked into Nier. Yoko then wanted to do a second Nier, and was told instead to do Drakengard 3.
- Development on original Nier took longer than expected. Regret their low metacritic score, and feel by the time they got their engine working it was at a point where other devs had a better handling of then hardware, so they looked more dated by comparison.
- Yoko felt Nier was an experiment, and that while modern games had a lot of love and quality work put into them, he felt once you played each one for 30 minutes you got an idea of what they'd be like until the end. Nier was an attempt to always keep the gameplay mixed up and surprising.
- Nier: Atomata is similarly structured to the original. When Saito (SE) requested Nier 2 he wanted a more action orientated game. Yoko wanted something more like Ocarina of Time, with fields to travel, as a "natural, nice way" for a game to be. Yoko feels Nier: Atomata is more his way than Saito's.
- Will retain the experimental, surprising design philosophy of the original. But doesn't want to retread ideas.
- Jokingly suggested making a boring, tedious game. Because that would indeed be surprising.
- Also suggested the game give random endings as paid DLC. Nobody liked that idea.
- He feels his most popular stories were written while he was drunk.
- He spent a lot of time angry with the dev team for Nier, and is impressed at Platinum's efficiency. Which he says frees him up to drink more, and thus write good stuff for the game.
- Story trailer stuff will come at a later date. This trailer was mainly to show off that it's a successor to Nier, and Platinum's involvement for what they do best.