Open Secret / Video Games

Open Secrets in Video Games.

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• In Dishonored, everyone seems to know something about the fact that Corvo and the Empress had an affair going on and that Emily is his daughter, but either try to talk around it or are somewhat unsure. The game treats these as mostly rumors until the sequel where they're flat-out confirmed.
• Dragon Age:
  • The Iron Bull of Dragon Age: Inquisition is supposed to join the Inquisition to spy on it for his Qunari superiors. However, he knows that the Inquisition's agents will discover his secret eventually, so in the interest of saving time he tells the Inquisitor his purpose and flat-out asks permission to send reports on their activities and in exchange, he'll give the Inquisition reports he gets from his Qunari contacts.
  • Blood Magic is illegal throughout Thedas, and party member Dorian says this is officially true for the Tevinter Imperium as well, and they put on a good show of condemning the practice. But this being a Decadent Court ruled by mages, it's an open secret that any Tevinter magister of high social/political standing engages in it.
  • On a less serious note, the best way to romance Cassandra is to pull off a Grand Romantic Gesture. She'd rather die than admit that she's a hopeless romantic, but if you go to your party members for advice about starting a relationship with her half of them will bring it up anyways.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Throughout the series, the Thieves' Guild doesn't have open guild halls like the Fighters or Mages guilds for obvious reasons. Instead, they tend to operate out of various taverns and clubs in major cities to create plausible deniability. Since their guild halls actually being secrets would be bad for business, everyone tends to know what goes on in these establishments...and if law enforcement starts sniffing around, blackmail or a well-placed bribe will usually get them to keep the "secret"...
  • In Skyrim, it's pretty much well-known that Solitude's Court Mage is a vampire in plain sight for everyone to see. Considering how loathed and dangerous vampires are, it's astonishing how she is allowed anywhere near the the local Jarl Elisif, nor does anyone ever spell out her true nature. Since she has found ways to quench her thirst for blood by feeding on Solitude's worst criminals rather than its citizens, she is tolerated which is more that can be said about other vampires in Skyrim.
• In Final Fantasy VII Remake, the kids of Sector 5 have a secret hideout in a town, which no one but kids are allowed to go into or even know about. The kids allow Aerith inside because she's a Nice Girl and One of the Kids, but the children seem to be under the impression that they're secret-keeping masters. In truth, the adults of the town are well-aware of this "secret" hideout, because the kids are very bad at keeping it anywhere close to hidden from the adults. But the adults play along with the idea anyway because it makes the kids happy.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, it's revealed that the Scions of the Seventh Dawn already knew from the start that the woman they knew as Yda wasn't actually Yda but her sister Lyse. As Y'Shtola explains, they saw through it immediately, but Papalymo begged them to keep it a secret to humor her. Besides, a part of her figured that they already figured it out, but just didn't want to believe it. It's unknown if the Eorzean leaders knew of this. It is however shown the Warrior of Light had no way of knowing this, regardless of if they started in 1.0 or A Realm Reborn, as the deception was already in play by the time they meet. To her credit, she apologizes for it.
• Guilty Gear: This is a series that is never really subtle in its Foreshadowing of major reveals. Just one example, it's never explicitly stated that Faust is Dr. Baldhead turning over a new leaf and putting a Brown Bag Mask on his head but come on, how many nine-foot tall doctors with spear-length surgical scalpels could there possibly be even in a setting as crazy as this one?
• Throughout the Hitman series, the International Contract Agency had been portrayed as an extremely secret clandestine organisation, connected to most major nations' secret services and the UN, only every operating through proxies' proxies. After their reformation in Absolution however, something changed, as they began to send large squadrons of highly conspicuous operatives in ICA uniform and marked vehicles to take over urban centres, where they cordon off streets, search houses and round up civilians like a police force. At one point, one of the ICA directors even swoops down on a South Dakota courthouse in an ICA helicopter and declares to the town's sheriff over megaphone that they're taking over. So much for subtlety.
• Octopath Traveler: The existence of the Obsidian Parlor brothel near Stillsnow, where the Obsidians keep and sell their Sex Slaves. Everybody in the area knows about it, but because it caters to wealthy patrons from the nearby Flamesgrace, including members of the clergy, they turn a blind eye so they can profit off of the business it brings to their town.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie, everyone who's acquainted with Rean Schwarzer already knows that the previous chancellor of the Empire of Erebonia, Giliath Osborne, is his biological father.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 2, the fact that Shepard is now working with Cerberus is known by pretty much everyone. Zaeed will even lampshade it at one point, calling it the worst-kept secret in the galaxy.
  • In Mass Effect 3, it seems that everyone knows that Liara is the new Shadow Broker. The only exceptions are Barla Von and Shepard if you didn't complete the relevant DLC.
• Persona 2: Eternal Punishment: Everybody knows that Club Zodiac is a Triad front, to the point that several NPCs are openly wondering why has the police has never investigated the place. Some high-schoolers who frequent the place admit that they don't care who runs it as long as they get to dance.
• Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire: The Ruautai Deadfire Company is officially a state-owned trade group attempting to buy bulk quantities of food and wood desperately needed in the Ruautai homeland. However, the fact that their "trade outposts" are heavily fortified and armed, and their leaders are all former officers who still use their military titles, means that no-one thinks that the RDC is anything other than a branch of the Ruautaian Navy getting ready to conquer some prime pieces of farmland.
• Most fans of competitive Pokémon are clear about the fact that the vast majority of players of VGC (the official competitive format hosted by TPCi) "gen" their Pokémon; that is, using external tools to illegally produce Pokémon with the exact properties desired on a given Mon that is indistinguishable from a Pokémon obtained and trained within the game by legal means without the actual catching and training process. This is largely considered acceptable by the general public because even after years of Anti-Frustration Features raising an entire competitive team from scratch takes tens of hours of work and cannot easily be changed after the fact without jumping through arbitrary hoops, but because using 3rd party tools is against official policy everyone keeps the legality of said "genned" Pokémon on the down low and is rarely questioned since there is no difference between a "genned" Pokémon and a Pokémon that can be found in-game.
• Played for Comedy in the Team Fortress 2 universe:
  • The teams may think that they're being all sneaky and secretive in their dealings, but they often get spectators in the form of locals who live near their 'secret' bases, who just want to watch two teams of idiots blow each other up.
  • It's also very heavily implied that the teams know the actual fights don't have much purpose, given that they're quite familiar with both the Administrator and Ms. Pauling, who keep the conflict going, but don't care because they like getting paid.
  • Spy being the Scout's father is possibly one, given that two of the sane/intelligible team members (Heavy and Sniper) know about it.
• Touhou Project: Eientei is very strange about this. In Perfect Memento in Strict Sense Akyuu most definitely considers Eirin and Kaguya humans as well as Reisen a youkai Earth Rabbit, even though almost a dozen people she could have told her they were Lunarians. The fact that Akyuu later devotes a whole section to a "Lunar Capital Exposition" Eientei hosted in Kaguya's article laughs in the face of an earlier note where in Eirin's article where Akyuu thinks she may have "a deep connection to the Lunar Capital."
  • From various world-building materials, it can be said that most human populace of Gensokyo are generally ignorant of many in-going of the world, mostly because Gensokyo's power-players (read: most named characters), whether it's youkai or humans, are deliberately making it so to maintain Gensokyo's power balance between the races. Best shown in Forbidden Scrollery; Kosuzu who doesn't know these conspiracies freaks out when she finds out the Noh dancer in Hakurei Shrine is a youkai who will control the populace's mind and reporting it to Marisa, the closest seemingly neutral human power-player she has contact with. Unfortunately, to those who know the true event of Hopeless Masquerade, it's no secret that Marisa is one of those who set up Kokoro as the shrine's Noh dancer as the most non-violent mean to channel her power, instead of almost triggering a civil war between the religious factions. What Kosuzu knows as "youkai extermination" is just a staged performance of those involved power-players so there's no misunderstanding over the "controlling the populace's mind" thing, not to stop it. In short, the "secret" is open to those people we, as the fourth wall audience, often fill the exposition shoes in as player characters and main antagonists but not so much for those nameless extras who don't get into fights at the drop of a hat.
• In World of Warcraft since the Cataclysm expansion, the zone of Azshara has a secret goblin R&D facility, cleverly named the Secret Lab. Several goblin non-player characters talk about how it'll make a good tourist attraction, and there's a visitor's guide book about the lab to be read at the nearby rocketway terminal. Goblins being goblins, "secret" and "R&D lab" are not particularly compatible concepts.

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