Techland, developer of Dead Island, has apologised for a line of code that called a skill given to one of the game's female characters "Feminist Whore."
The code, spotted by posters on the Steam forum, refers to a skill which gives Purna, pictured above, a 15 per cent damage boost against male foes. In the game itself, the skill is called Gender Wars. In a statement issued to Eurogamer, Techland said that it, too, was shocked by the discovery.
"It obviously violates professional and ethical standards at Techland and should never have happened," said international brand manager Blazej Krakowiak. "We're investigating this right now and we'll issue a statement later.
"For now, I can only express my sincerest apologies for this incident and assure you that whoever acted so irresponsibly did not represent the views and opinions of Techland.
"I'm equally sure that aside from the author of that unfortunate line of code, everyone at the office is as disturbed by this as you are."
In a follow-up statement passed to Tracey John, Techland said: "It has come to our attention that one of Dead Island's leftover debug files contains a highly inappropriate internal script name of one of the character skills.
"This has been inexcusably overlooked and released with the game. The line in question was something a programmer considered a private joke. The skill naturally has a completely different in-game name and the script reference was also changed.
"What is left is part of an obscure debug function. This is merely an explanation, but by no means an excuse. In the end that code was made a part of the product and signed with our company name.
"We deeply regret that fact and we apologise to all our customers or anyone who might have been offended by that inappropriate expression. The person responsible for this unfortunate situation will face professional consequences for violating the professional standards and beliefs Techland stands for."
Publisher Deep Silver was also compelled to apologise this week after it emerged that it had uploaded a development build to Steam rather than the final version. Dead Island is out today in Europe for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, and you can read our review here.
Source: Eurogamer / Tracey John
Comments
9Ouch.
I don't think it could get any worse for them at the moment. Maybe there's a pile of children's corpses in the CEO's office? Jesus.
I'm sure if you take the game's executable and interpret it as ASCII, you're going to find at least a couple of obscene words. It's a scandal!!! Wont somebody please think of the children?
so only one person knew about this? yeah, right
Good god people. Grow some thicker skin......
Me: I'm so offended right now, someone called me Dick.
Friend.: But your name is Richard and Dick is short for Richard.
Me: Now your offending me.....
This western world is getting weaker and weaker by the day because of this crap. Grow some thicker skin and get over it if something offends you.
Your example isn't anywhere near being the same sort of thing. I don't object to him doing that. He was probably stressed at the time and blowing off some steam but it's just retarded letting that get into the final code that gets sent out to customers. It's unprofessional.
Why on earth are people reading through the code anyway? Am I missing something? Don't these people have better things to do???
I'm a programmer. It was some comment or variable name. I get it. It doesn't f'ing matter! This is ridiculous. Sure, if it was visible in-game or on the box or manual they're would be a problem... but seriously... can everyone calm the fuck down!
Fire the guy who wrote it (or perform some kind of medieval punishment) and move on.
It's a PC game it's expected that people will look at whatever they can. I don't see a problem with it as he may have been stressed and did that to help blow some steam off but you damn well make sure it's not in the final code that gets sent out.
Actually, to be honest... this whole debacle will probably help sales...