Just recently, someone who played Dead Island revealed that he’d discovered a disturbingly offensive skill name when messing through the game’s dev code.
“FeministWhorePurna” is the ability title and it was discovered uncensored inside Data0.pak\Data\default_player_setup.scr file. It’s been suggested to have been an early name for the Gender Wars skill, which provides female character Purna extra damage against male opponents.
Blazej Krakowiak, Techland international brand manager gave the following reply to Eurogamer:
“It obviously violates professional and ethical standards at Techland and should never have happened. 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.”
There’s also a further response from Techland to Tracey Writes Stuff:
“We deeply regret that fact and we apologize 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.”
What are you thoughts? Should the person be punished or Techland doesn’t need to take this seriously?
Dead Island just hit the shelves recently to PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
Land of the free?
Sep 11. 2011
I personally find this to be quite funny. I dont see why everybody has to be so touchy feely and pissed off at every little offensive thing, its a part of life. Damn political correctness. If they wanted to add that in the game (which technically they didnt) I dont see a problem with it. It’s called FREEDOM. If you dont like it, dont play it. You have the freedom to do so.
Justin W.
Sep 12. 2011
I agree with the above comment. Seriously people, its not even IN the freaking game, it was buried in code so unless you happen to scrolling through it, you wouldnt even notice…and frankly, lets face it, Purna IS a feminist. That girl i dont think has said a single nice thing about a male character the entire time and her background shows serious issues with men. Considering the game involves cussing up a storm, such as but not limited to, bitch, asshole, fucker, and bastard, i think whore is a little weak sauce comparitively. the progammer did nothing wrong considering the other content of the game and its not like its going to affect a childs mind since if a kid plays this game, i sincerely doubt they would even notice compared to the blood, violence, gore, and general awesomeness of a zombie killing spree, but i ramble. long story short, they shouldnt have to apologize to a bunch of feminist whores for having one of their own called out like that.
Zach I.
Sep 22. 2011
Id hardly call that “Disturbingly offensive” and it was probably a just a placeholder name until they named the skill “Gender Wars” that was never taken out of the coding, and had they not of actually looked through the code, no one would have seen it, and no one would’ve cared.
Also, words like that should never be taken for their literal dictionary meaning. While its true that whore means prostitute, its also used to describe a very mean-spirited woman. The worst part about it is the fact that the “offensiveness” about it is a complete double standard. Had the code been “SexistassholeJoe” no one would’ve batted an eye.