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Ubisoft has apologised for a homophobic slur found on wall graffiti in The Division 2.
The slur can be found on a huge wall art asset depicting a police officer eating a doughnut. At close inspection – as recorded here in this lengthy Imgur post that shows a series of spelling mistakes in environmental art – you can see the slur written in “leetspeak” on the police officer’s badge.
“It’s been brought to our attention that a piece of street art in Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 contained offensive content. We removed the image from the game via a patch on Thursday, April 11,” Ubisoft said in a statement (thanks, Eurogamer).
“We apologise that this image slipped through our content review processes, and we are currently reviewing them in order to avoid this kind of oversight from occurring in the future.”
In November, Ubisoft u-turned a decision to prepare Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege for Asian territories by amending or removing a number of in-game visuals to temper references to violence, sex, and gambling.
While it had initially said was preparing for a “single, global vision” and outlined planned changes to make the game compliant with Asian laws, the community pushed back and many expressed their dismay at the announcement, with some players insisting that some of these changes, such as removal of the slot machines, would have an impact on gameplay.
The publisher later announced that it would revert those changes given the strong community feedback. A blog post said the team had “spent the last week working on solutions and have decided that [they] will be reverting all aesthetic changes”.
Not too long ago, Red Candle Games also had to apologise for releasing a game with offensive material in it. Its latest release, Devotion, was pulled from the Steam store after Chinese players review bombed the indie horror because of an in-game poster that said “Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh moron” apparently referring to the Chinese president.
