I think most of us can agree that punching the Nazis is a good thing. Heck, a lot of great video games are based on that same premise. That’s why it was weird when a State of decay 2 The player discovered that the game gives the characters a negative effect for having taken out the garbage in their pre-apocalyptic life.
In State of decay 2, the open world zombie game released by Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios in 2018, each survivor you recruit comes equipped with random shots that reflect what they did before the outbreak and the effects that lived experiences have on their personality. Survivors may, for example, be afraid of rats, making them pest control professionals, providing an advantage to your maximum food storage.
Steam Marines 2 developer Yik-Sian James Seow collected State of decay 2 on sale in January and quickly assembled one long Twitter thread about your time with the game. But last week he noticed something strange: one of his survivors appeared to have a negative personality effect due to the shooting of “punctured Nazis.” Under the flavor text, the game explained that kicking skinheads out of a local concert in a previous life indicated that the character was generally “irritable to other people” rather than, you know, doing the right thing in that scenario.
“It simply came to our notice then State of decay 2 developers are great with the Nazis, ”Seow he wrote, starting with a day of tweeting asking Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios about the shot. He was finally blocked by the official State of decomposition account, which now says the study it was caused by a false positive to his “social listening software” after the harassment rain he received afterwards offering public support for Black History Month.
In later tweets shared yesterday, Undead Labs explained that the shooting of “stabbed Nazis” was never presented in a totally negative light, as it also provides survivors with a greater combat experience and makes them “more likely to passionately argue their beliefs. “, the latter of which was accidentally altered with the addition of new game mechanics.
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“When the Moral System arrived, it simplified our original nuanced concept of‘ characters defending their beliefs ’into a negative basic moral effect, which represented discord in the community,” Undead Labs wrote. “So today, this feature has a positive skill bonus and red text in the user interface due to the likelihood of arguing. It’s been like this for years and we never realized the confusion. which seems to be up tonight (unusual and we have over 1,300 shots) “.
Undead Labs plans to correct this problem in a future review by eliminating the negative effect currently associated with the “prickly Nazis” trait, making it the positive personality indicator it always had to be. Survivors will still get a boost in their combat experience, but rightly so the community will not consider them a nuisance for having resisted the white supremacists.
As is often the case in these situations, Seow himself has been at the other end of a hate campaign by players who would rather defend the rights of the Nazis than harshly analyze the hatred that has been allowed to be fostered in their communities and uprooted. Establishing a safe and welcoming society requires that we be so intolerant of intolerance, and if you can’t even get down with that in a video game, well, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.