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Freakazoid_ posted:A similar german influenced censorship happened with City of Heroes. It has an npc faction called the 5th column. They're nazis, remnants of Hitler's secret forces who carried on the fight well after ww2. They are one of the original enemy factions when the game released in april 2004. The 5th Column is a huge clusterfuck and I would have to go digging through old resources to be 100% sure, but basically: - At the time, they claimed this was a planned story turn all along and had nothing to do with releasing in Europe. - For years people argued incessantly about whether or not The Law That Says You Can't Put Nazis in a Videogame is real. (Answer: Not really, but also kind of.*) - Way after the fact they finally admitted that they did it to cover their rear end because they didn't know the full extent of the law and would rather just cut that off at the pass. - Worth noting that around that time they were beginning to sketch out what City of Villains was going to be like, which originally involved creating your character and then joining up with existing groups, so that may have influenced their decision but it's never come up in that context so who knows. - In the end, the Column returned and also were never at risk of running afoul of the law in the first place. *To my (limited) understanding, the law is primarily concerned with the glorification of nazis and their symbols. I might be wildly off base, but I would assume it's less that you literally cannot ever legally have a video game with swastikas and more you need to spend time and effort arguing your case, and most of the time you'd probably fail because your example of usage is on nazi death robots or other frivolous poo poo. Better to just censor that poo poo and be done with it. Edit: Looking it up via old story bible stuff, it looks like the original claim that it was planned all along was a complete lie. They did plot out a bunch of stuff, but seemingly with the starting point being "we need to swap out these nazis for not-nazis ASAP, and also introduce the new alien character classes, and also foreshadow City of Villains stuff"...which is exactly what they ended up doing. The alien stuff did exist beforehand in the background of the Column, but nothing in the OG story bible says anything about a secret inner group or an alien takeover or any of the stuff that came along with them being removed. Of course, it was also always telling that they did a complete and total find and replace across the entire game to remove literally every single mention that the 5th Column existed. Even in text that was meant for in-world historical plaques, suddenly they'd be referred to as "the group that preceded the Council" or whatever. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Jan 20, 2020 |
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Jan 20, 2020 10:34
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 14:36 |
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Gotcha. The fact that games existed in a weird limbo state is probably why confusion was so widespread. Combine that with the deliberate misinfo from the CoH devs and the inevitable game of telephone (stuff like "no swastikas" turning into "no nazis of any kind") and it's no wonder nobody could conclusively explain why the Column had to go bye-bye.
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Jan 20, 2020 11:27
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