Well, remind me never to anger a Far Cry fan again. Those playing 2014’s Far Cry 4 on Steam have been getting rather irate on social media after Ubisoft seemingly censored some of the game’s nudity. With many linking this unannounced change to the company’s recently announced partnership with Tencent, things got quite heated. However, Ubisoft has now confirmed that the censorship wasn’t intentional and was due to a “technical error,” and has now swiftly reverted Far Cry 4 back to its original state.
The Far Cry series has had a few surprising and memorable nude scenes over the years, and in Far Cry 4 the main target of players’ anti-censorship frustrations are the scenes within the Shanath Arena where a drugged Ajay is forced to participate in a blood sport. The guards in the arena are almost all topless, but Steam players found earlier today that they were now all clothed. All other instances of nudity in the open-world game, and apparently those in the Blood Dragon spinoff, were also changed. This immediately triggered angry accusations of forced censorship, but Ubisoft has leapt into action to clarify exactly what happened.
“After looking into it, we confirmed that there was a mistake during a recent update: content meant specifically for the Japanese version of the game was mistakenly uploaded to the worldwide (WW) version on Steam. This resulted in unintended changes, including censored models and assets,” the official Far Cry X account says in response to one unhappy player.
“No worries, there are no plans to censor Far Cry at any time,” it adds. “This was simply an error tied to a specific regional build, and it’s now been corrected.”
The account has also explained that this has always been in the Japanese version to comply with the country’s stricter ratings policies, and the game “was not newly censored.” This error has now been fixed and nudity has been restored to the Steam version.
While I too would be confused if an aspect of a ten-year-old game had been mysteriously changed, the immediate hysteria at Far Cry 4 becoming boob-less is equal parts funny and depressing. The theories of this being an early side effect of Ubisoft’s recently announced partnership with Tencent, which sees the Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, and Rainbow Six franchises spun out into a new subsidiary, were also extremely reactive.
Still, you can now go and play Far Cry 4 on Steam in all its, erm, glory? While I am admittedly a sucker for a Far Cry game, here are some other great RPGs and single-player games that you should also look at giving a go.
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