SWAT sim Ready or Not’s recent Steam reviews cratered to Mostly Negative recently, in the wake of changes to the game’s content to meet console standards that were—if not widely, then vocally—perceived to be censorship by a number of fans.
What kind of changes? Well, mostly stuff regarding nudity and violence: among other things, some hostages who were formally fully naked in the game now wear underwear, enemies can no longer be dismembered after death (but can be dismembered while living), and one particular level which previously featured a child convulsing in bed now has that child sleeping instead.
That set fans off to the extent that the devs at VOID Interactive have come out with a statement to try to mollify them. In a post on Steam, VOID said that “misconceptions and misinformation” have been circulating about just how far-ranging the changes are, and explicitly listed—with before-and-after shots—the changes that have been made to the game’s PC version. It then went on to reassure fans that “Missions such as Elephant, Neon Tomb, and the infamous Valley of the Dolls,” a level which sees you storm the home of a child pornographer, “remain unchanged.”
Rather than a sweeping overhaul of the game’s content, VOID says that there were in fact just six changes overall to the game PC players are already familiar with. In addition to the changes I mentioned up top, VOID has also put underwear on a police informant hostage (who has still, quite visibly, been brutally tortured) and a ghillie-suited suspect, while a piece of evidence that was previously called “prohibited images of minors”—featuring shots of faces and a figure in a bikini—is now simply called “photographic evidence,” and features no images of people at all.
“VOID Interactive has always believed in creative freedom and the right to build experiences that push boundaries in the service of immersion and realism. That will not change,” say the devs, but emphasise that “we operate in a global ecosystem of platform standards, age rating boards, and local legal restrictions.” Nevertheless, VOID says “While we may disagree with how some content is treated, we’ve only made changes where absolutely required, and only to the letter of the regulations—no further… That’s a reality of the world we publish in—not a change in our creative vision or values.”
The statement does not seem to have assuaged angry fans: Ready or Not has received over a thousand negative reviews in the time since the statement went live, while the response to it in the Steam comments consists of (at the time of writing) 114 pages of people decrying “censorship” and “betrayal.”
If anything, the statement may have worsened things: “So you’re saying you’re hearing us but refusing to listen,” reads one early—and comparatively calm—comment. As our own Elie Gould said in a previous article: I suspect a console release is much more important to VOID than some angry fans tanking its Steam reviews, but I reckon it’s gonna be dealing with these kinds of complaints for a while.
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