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.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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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.
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.
How often does it need to be said? Do not preorder games based on what they looked like in the trailers!
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.
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.
I get that. I'm saying showing less thigh doesn't make the game run faster and developers might not view something like that as a waste.
... apparently boobs now.
I feel like jiggle physics has been around for just as long
It seems silly to me.
It's essentially rehashing the debate of people being more comfortable with violence than sexual content. A game can have someone getting vivisected with a shotgun and no one really cares but having full frontal nudity will end up with a game that has articles written about it.
From what I've heard Stellar Blade didn't have full frontal nudity or anything remotely close to that level but the outfits were toned down. I don't think it's really necessary especially when you can choose which outfit the protagonists wears.
I feel like this has been the norm for a while though with games getting released here in the west with women being less sexualized. I'm kind out of the loop about Stellar Blade so I'm not sure if it was censored globally.
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
The sex cards in the first Witcher were particularly egregious. One of them is a woman who sleeps with you as a reward for saving her from being raped.
I suppose I'll edit my comment to only mention the third
As others have said, it's called self censorship. If you don't like a game, don't buy it. If you like porn buy it. #capitalism
I'm against censorship. Sucks not being able to see what the developers created first hand you know. First thoughts that come to my mind is its because of corporate, political or religious reasons. Really could give a crap about someone wanting to see boobies move as they battle monsters 😂 I just see it as you see an ad and when you get the product it's nothing like you envisioned. Stuff like that isn't new and folks will learn to focus on these examples and decide in the future to support or object such business practices.
lmao