Nier Director Yoko Taro assures players he’s been working on projects, but they keep getting cancelled
Taro concedes it’s better to release nothing at all than something that isn’t quite right
Nier director Yoko Taro says he’s been working on numerous projects in recent years, but none of them have seen the light of day.
The game director was in attendance at the G-CON 2025 conference in South Korea last week, where he had an on-stage conversation with Clovers Studio founder Hideki Kamiya.
As reported by 4Gamer.net, the discussion ended with Kamiya and Yoko both being asked what they were currently working on.
Yoko responded by explaining that while to the outside world it has appeared that he hasn’t been working on anything for a while, the projects he’s been working on keep being cancelled during development.
“People often say things like, ‘why don’t you make a sequel to NieR?’ or ‘Yoko isn’t doing any work’, but lately there have been many projects that ended up being stopped partway through,” he said (via machine translation).
So I was working, but they just didn’t make it out into the world. Since I’ve been paid for it, it’s no personal problem for me, but because nothing has been released as output, it looks like I haven’t been working.”
Yoko said he didn’t consider this a problem, because he’d rather not be responsible for a game that doesn’t live up to his typical standards.
“I don’t have any negative feelings about it, because I think it’s better not to release something at all than to put out something odd or not quite right”.
At the same event two years ago, Yoko and Nier series producer Yosuka Saito said they were working together on a project separate from Nier, and that they would like to talk about it in 2024 at some point. This never happened, and it’s not clear if this is one of the cancelled projects Yoko was referring to in his latest comments.
Saito reportedly said during the same 2023 event that as long as Yoko remained alive the Nier series would continue, but also stressed that there were circumstances that prevented them from releasing another one soon.
Yoko, who is best known for Nier: Automata, warned earlier this year that he thinks AI could make all game developers unemployed within 50 years, saying “game creators may be treated like bards” when this happens.
