Squashing developer Shift Up’s promise that the highly anticipated action title would be released completely “uncensored,” Sony has announced that it will fix a piece of graffiti found in Starblade due to an absolutely reach IGN’s accusation that the game’s artwork could be read as a reference to a racial slur.
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Shift Up first offered confirmation of an uncensored film Starblade released April 21.
Taking to the game’s official Twitter account, the developer announced in English and Japanese that “Starblade offers the same uncensored version in all countries, including the Japanese version.
And while this announcement was met with thunderous applause from the game’s enthusiastic fans, especially in light of the Western video game industry’s constant criticism of its protagonist’s attractive appearance, it would suffice of a single complaint from IGN for the game’s publisher, Sony, to render the warranty null and void.
During their review of the game, the gaming media found themselves clutching their pearls at the location of large graffiti reading “Hard” next to a bright neon “R” sign, the latter object indicating a nearby encounter. location of one of the game’s NPCs, Roxanne, which they believe was a reference to the “Hard R” version (the term referring to the dictionary spelling of the word as opposed to the colloquial version ending with “a”) of the “n-word “racial slur”.
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Raising the issue directly with Sony rather than Shift Up, IGN was later informed by a company representative that “placing two graphics near each other in Stellar Blade resulted in an unintended objectionable phrase . Shift Up did not intend to create offensive artwork and will replace the graffiti for the Day 1 patch.”
Furthermore, when pressed by the media outlet on whether these censorship efforts would extend to removing the graphics from the physical version of the game given that said copies would have been printed with the original version of the game’s code, the representative again asserted that graffiti “should be removed for all.” users in the day 1 update.”
Keeping their promise, Sony’s patch for Starblade is now live.
As Kotaku discovered, instead of “Hard,” the post-patch graffiti now reads “Crime.”
Starblade is set to begin its exclusive release on PlayStation 5 on April 26.
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