Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release.
Personally, they could’ve left it in as an unlock or as a second option in case people were uncomfortable seeing a good looking woman fight monsters and jiggle about but that’s just me.
What are your thoughts on censoring games? Does it not remove the original version of the lead developers? Maybe because of cultural reasons in your country?
I’d like to know!
There’s such thing as consumer-driven censorship.
Let’s say that I’m a game developer, and also a terrible person. After beating my game, it shows a victory screen that says “You know, Hitler might have been right!” Everyone will shit on the game; and that’s just normal player reaction.
Now, it’s easy to predict that no one would be so negative towards giant exposed breasts - except yes, plenty of people are. For all the porn-obsessed pervs out there, tons of people just want to enjoy an action adventure game without cringing distractions.
Don’t believe me? Look at Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The game lost a bunch of its potential sales to players that might enjoy a sweeping JRPG, but couldn’t stand frequent boob/butt shots of its overendowed and subservient female main character.
If a little extra jiggle was crucial to the vision, then I’d say they need a better vision, but that’s just me. The commentary I heard around this case in particular is that ratings boards around the world impose a ton of different criteria, and getting around all of them is no easy feat, so that could be to blame.
It depends on what the vision is supposed to be. If the dev was making a hentai game, but had the scenes censored, then that fundementally destroys the purpose of the game and ruins the point.
If it was a game like Stellar Blade which seems like it has a lot more going on in terms of story and worldbuilding, combat and death, then the sexual parts seem almost more exploitative and distract/clash with the primary themes. I have not played it and cannot say absolutely, though, in this case.
Then there are games like the Witcher 3 where sex plays a moderate part in the life of the protagonist and adds to the realism and grit of the world, and so sexual imagery actually adds to the game in that way.
So, I think it all depends on execution and perceived intent.
Edit: none of this is to say I support censorship, I think as long as content is clearly marked it should be up to the player what they want to see, I’m talking about what the censorship impacts in the game experience.
The first Witcher encapsulates Geralt’s (many) sexual conquests in collectible cards. And almost none of the encounters have any bearing on the plot. Having a hard time not calling that exploitative.
Much of what’s going on, especially lately, is simple xenophobia. There are arbitrary restrictions on what can be sexualized when Asian character designs are used.
I’ve only played Witcher 3 and found a lot of the interesting parts of the world to be the darker parts you don’t see in other fantasy games, a lot of the themes of the quests are very heavy, like the bloody Baron’s quest as an easy popular mention.
Therefore, the addition of places like whorehouses or other quests related to that deepen the realism of the world in a way that something like Skyrim would absolutely never, and if those bits were ever censored out it would reduce the immersive realism of the world, to me
Changing designs due to market pressures isn’t censorship. Remember the Sonic movie, where they redid the animation due to criticism? Nobody was outraged at that change but when it’s tits, all of a sudden people care.
Summarized it much better than I could.
If you’ve ever seen isometric pixel sprites, authors often draw those first “naked” to get the shape right. If they show an in development model that’s naked, and later have added clothes, is that then “censorship”? No of course it fucking isn’t.
What “market pressure” are you talking about? The game topped charts because it seemingly wasn’t afraid to have an attractive female lead while backing that up with fun gameplay. The difference with the Sonic movie was that no one liked the original design, and the movie wasn’t patched after people bought tickets.
You know there are a shit load of games with attractive female leads and amazing gameplay right?
You say it as if developers are terrified to make attractive girl characters…
Is this really something you waste time thinking about, whether or not the devs waste their frame budget on boob jiggle physics?
Seriously, there’s so much to optimize in a game to get good performance, jiggling boons is way down on the list of things to worry about.
I think it depends on the developer. They might lump it in with other realism things like hair physics.
I think what OP is talking about is things being removed. It doesn’t have much to do with optimising the game.
It does if you’re using physics to simulate it. Sure, if it’s just part of an animation you’re not losing anything by having it. But if you’re calculating the physics in real-time, it’s costly. They do it for hair, clothes, and apparently boobs now.
