I think most of us agree that hitting the Nazis is a good thing. Heck, a bunch of great video games are based on that very premise. That’s why it was weird when he State of decay 2 The player discovered that the game gives the characters a negative effect because it took out the garbage in their pre-apocalyptic life.
In the State of decay 2, the open-world zombie game launched by Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios in 2018, each survivor you recruit comes equipped with random traits that reflect both what they did before the outbreak and the effects these lived experiences have on the personality their. Survivors can, for example, be “afraid of rats”, which in turn makes them professionals in pest control, offering a bonus for maximum food storage.
Steam Marines 2 developer Yik-Sian James Seow picked up State of decay 2 on sale in January and quickly set up a long Twitter thread about the time spent with the game. But last week, he noticed something strange: one of his survivors seemed to get a negative personality effect from the “fist Nazi” trait. Under the flavor text, the game explained that driving skinheads out of a local concert in a previous life indicated that the character was generally “irritable to other people,” rather than, you know, just doing what what is needed in that scenario.
“It simply came to our notice then State of decay 2 developers are great with the Nazis, ”Seow wrote, starting with a day of tweeting, asking Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios about the feature. He was stuck in the end by the official Degradation state account, which the studio says now was caused by a false positive in his “social listening software” after the harassing rain he received afterwards providing public support for Black History Month.
In the subsequent tweets shared yesterday, Undead Labs explained that the trait of the “fallen Nazis” was never meant to be presented in a completely negative light, as it also gives survivors an increased fighting experience and makes them “more inclined to argue with passion. for their beliefs ”, the latter which was accidentally modified with the addition of new game mechanics.
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“When the Morale system arrived, it simplified our original concept of ‘characters arguing their beliefs’ into a negative basic moral effect, representing discord in the community,” Undead Labs wrote. “So today, this feature has a positive skill bonus and a red text in the user interface, due to the probability of arguing. It’s been like this for years and we never realized how confusing it looked until tonight (it’s not common and we have over 1300 features). ”
Undead Labs intends to fix this problem in a future quick fix by eliminating the negative effect currently associated with the “Punched Nazis” trait, turning it into the positive personality indicator that it has always been meant to be. Survivors will continue to receive a boost for their fighting experience, but will rightly not be considered a nuisance by the community because they have faced white supremacists.
As is often the case in these situations, Seow himself was at the other end of a hate campaign by players who would rather advocate for the rights of the Nazis than take a long, hard look at the hatred they were allowed to stimulate in their communities and uproot it. Establishing a secure and welcoming society requires us to be intolerant to intolerance, and if you can’t even handle that in a video game, well, don’t let the door slam your ass on the way out.