Ready or Not, the SWAT sim shooter, is known for its brutality. You can blow the head off an enemy combatant, dismember bodies, or just hit them in the back of the head with your gun. It's certainly not to everyone's taste but, for those who like it, the gore seems to really matter.
But Ready or Not's devs are dialling the gore and violence down, just a tad. "Player-induced dismemberment still has a large presence in the game, but is a little more limited as to when it occurs," a dev blog post says.
You can no longer dismember enemies when they're dead but the "level of dismemberment itself when it occurs was not actually toned down." Some character art which involves torture has also been tuned down: "The tortured police informant on Narcos is still missing fingers, eyes, and covered in fresh wounds and blood, but a little less so."
Other changes include less explicit nudity for a handful of civilians and a suspect, and a "substantial effort to present the mistreatment against children in the game in a responsible way." One example of a recent change is how the child in Twisted Nerve has had an "animation change" to be sleeping instead of convulsing.
I can't imagine why this wouldn't be the case, to begin with. But these aren't just random changes made because the devs have had a change of heart, they've actually all been brought on by Ready or Not's console launch.
There are stricter rules when it comes to getting games on Xbox or PlayStation, which is why the violence of Ready or Not needed to be dialled back. But the devs do stress that all the changes were minimal.
"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," the blog post says. "It's largely just evidence and nudity that's altered, and the texture changes don't affect the PC version.
"We've done our utmost to only make changes when they are flagged as absolutely required by our first-party partners, and any changes aim to remain faithful to the original tonality of the game, so there is no reason to be alarmed." But as small as these may be, players still aren't happy.
The discontent with the recent changes has manifested itself in a review bombing campaign. Recent reviews on Steam are currently down from Very Positive to Mixed over the last couple of days.
Some players are willing to look past buggy DLCs and a lack of content but agree that "the censorship is a step too far". Others feel as if this is the final straw, a change in direction for Ready or Not that they don't buy into, with the poor performance whittling their enthusiasm down for a while before these changes.
"Devs would rather change/censor things so they can release the game on consoles due to stricter standards rather than actually fix bugs/issues," one negative review complains. I've also seen negative reviews which suggest the developers misled players during the early access period: "Promised backers something in exchange for funding their development. Took the money, then went back on all their promises. It's something I believe they need to be held accountable for." But all the anger can be boiled down to how these changes have ruined the best part of Ready or Not: its dark atmosphere.
Review bombing has shown some success in the past, with the most notable over the last couple of years being all the drama with Helldivers 2. But I'm not sure it'll work in this case, getting Ready or Not on consoles is probably a bigger concern than Mixed Steam reviews for developer VOID Interactive.
