Ready of Not team tries to reassure PC players over console content changes

With the console release of the co-op tactical shooter Ready or Not just around the corner, developer Void Interactive has ended up in a bit of a pickle, as the PC community has taken to review bombing the game over content changes aiming to meet the policies of global platforms and age rating bodies.

Providing new side-by-side and very specific details, Void Interactive insist that these are “minor content changes” being made so that they can have one unified set of assets and features to better support the full cross-play between platforms. The game will still be as gory and violent as ever, and it will still feature full limb dismemberment (albeit now only for characters while they are alive), and many levels are completely unchanged.

Where Void is making changes in in removing nudity – video game ratings are often totally fine with killing hundreds of people, but showing a bit of a boob? That’s not OK. So a number of characters that had nudity or exposed genitals now have underwear on. There’s also one instance where a child is now depicted as sleeping instead of convulsing, and one collectable piece of evidence that is now generic photographic evidence instead of “Photo of Minors” with a pile of children’s photographed faces.

All in all, this feels like a storm in a teacup. Void Interactive was up front about the incoming changes and described their intent last week, and has now provided side-by-side comparisons on Steam.

Here’s the six specific visual changes that Void are making to the PC version of Ready or Not:

• Twisted Nerve: The girl is now depicted as sleeping instead of convulsing.  
• A Lethal Obsession: Nudity involving the ghillie suit suspect has been adjusted 
• Hide and Seek: Female hostages now wear underwear 
• Narcos: Police informant hostage now wears underwear 
• 23 Megabytes a Second: ‘Photo of Minors’ objective model was revised, also to better connect narratively with the later ‘Sinuous Trail’ mission.
• Post-mortem dismemberment has been disabled (note: dismemberment for living characters remains unchanged)

Scanning through the comments, there’s still an awful lot of people decrying what they view as naked censorship, and there’s plenty others who are more accepting.

In the original statement, Void wrote, “The changes with the console version are small enough that most people here wouldn’t notice if we didn’t say anything, but we want to be transparent. It’s largely just evidence and nudity that’s altered, and the texture changes don’t affect the PC version.”

This is absolutely the kind of thing that happens constantly behind the scenes when games, films, TV shows go to the ratings boards. There’s plenty of public back-and-forth discussions for the creation of South Park, for example, as the show’s creators bargain with lawyers over what they will and won’t tweak and change. For Void, this is just being done out in the open and after release.

The difficulty is trying to apply this globally, and similar examples might include Conan: Exiles, where the console version removed nudity to avoid an AO (Adults Only) rating and receive an M in the US. There have also been games that received an AO rating purely for the tone of their violence – such as Hatred in 2015, where you are a mass murdering villain. Ready or Not has received an M rating in the US, with the listing mentioning nudity, but has an restricted 18+ rating in Australia from the PC version, which Void could be trying to reduce. It could also be the platform holders applying their own judgments.

Ready of Not is going to launch for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on 15th July.