Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
So NCsoft are censoring western Blade and Soul afterall?
This discussion has been closed.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
How many people who wanted to buy this game will now not buy it because of the Westernization? My thought is probably not that many. Those who have been anticipating this game, probably still are.
vs
How many people who wanted to buy this game would choose to avoid it without the Westernization edits? Yeah, I see that number much higher than the number to the previous question.
mmorpg junkie since 1999
Especially when it comes to online games where they tend to try to appeal to as many people as possible, it's pretty much a given that there would be changes, there's basically always changes when one gets shipped over here. Anyone with any awareness of how things work that thought the whole of the game would come over with zero changes other than the language it was in must have been high on some pretty good stuff, and they need to pass that around.
What they said they wouldn't censor was the costumes, and they didn't, each one over there, is the same as the ones over here. Then one thing many of those raising their pitchforks over this keep conveniently failing to mention is that some of these oh so terrible changes that completely destroyed the devs vision of the game, were made as the South Korean devs wanted them changed. Many others surely had to be given the ok by the devs as well.
I have no doubt many people on this hate band wagon have been just hopping on as it's the in thing to do on the Internet, not as they actually care about the issue, and may not have intended to play, or at least spend money on it either way. The game wasn't destroyed, and had others not told them there were any changes, no one would have known. This is just another case of people on the Internet doing the usual thing of looking for something to complain about, as that's what people love to do the most on Internet forums. Nothing is ever good enough, and people always manage to find something to complain about, always.
Some people seem to forget that the Lyn can actually look more like teenagers and the like if you actually customize them specific ways as well. They can be much larger and have some amount of breasts, something you will never see as an Elin.
So care to explain to me where your character's shirt went if it is indeed a female because in the korean version i've messed around with i have never ONCE seen this at all.
Also the person posting two very different costumes has very little to do with censorship or changes. Those two costumes look like that in the korean versions too. One is more of a gothic lolita outfit while the other is a semi short party dress like visual. They of course are going to look wildly different as they would in real life too...
She literally said she enjoys competition and that women can enjoy competition, but she can't enjoy herself if she has to be on the defensive all the time in an MMORPG. Frankly I don't think that's an issue that is only facing women as many of us do not like having to be on the defensive any time we are playing due to the roaming bands of higher level griefers that purposely run around killing lower level players.
I love the people that are like "well people can just band together and protect those people" and it just doesn't seem to happen. A lot of the time this isn't one person roaming about PK'ing but rather groups or 3 or more in very good gear with little fear unless there are systems in place to punish PK or people actually do band together. So it's a logical statement that she doesn't like being on the defensive 24/7 as a woman and many women do feel the same way as do many men.
The Jun to Kun thing is about the only silly statement i see shown in the text there and is less about feminism instead of putting in a word people might feel is made derogatory (so yes semi prudish, but not that badly). I'm sure we'd have people running around calling him Kun the Kunt relatively quickly due to how juvenile a lot of people act.
I don't view her as having a feminist agenda and while what she said was about how women feel in gaming I think she was answering from her personal thoughts on the matter for herself as a woman that games, she wasn't trying to say all women and realistically if it was a fielded question to her I think she did well with the answer ultimately.
No one enjoys watching out for griefers in open world pvp games and we oft refer to them as gankfests for a reason
The gaming community is just gaining more information into the inner workings of what happens with localization of late and a very vocal minority of them want to whine that it's not a direct translation brought over here. As such they'd pretty much probably hate every asian market MMORPG that has EVER been brought to the western market as this has pretty much been par for the course since the Asian MMORPG existed.
They target the audience for where they are localizing, they make changes based on local things to that region to try and entice more people to buy/try out/ play the game. It's not entirely about sexism or caving to feminists and more about what they think is going to make them more money in the long run. People may of had some issue with that quest that was censored for instance because it is sort of an implied rape scenario where he forces women to marry him just so he can have sex with them and feel less guilty about having sex with them.
Given how prudish the US market is about sex in general this change itsn't overtly suprising. We love to glorify the hell out of violence, but even talk about sex where children "might" see it and OMG it's the biggest deal in the freaking universe suddenly.
This is censorship for the sake of being PC, in a big, oiled, bouncing titty mmo.
I'm just gonna say that the main appeal of this game is the big crazy tits, you can say it's the PVP or whatever but the claim to fame of this game mainly is the art style and the big ol titties. So to get all politically correct here is laughable.
Also stop with the "lul you just want to fap to it" nonsense, this is the excuse feminists uses to get away with censorship and was used to stop DOA3 volleyball being released in the west, Xenoblade Chronicles X being censored and many other things in the first step of the gaming censorship crusade currently underway. What's next in this line of thinking?
"oh you complain about gore scenes removed from a horror movie, are you a wannabe murderer or something? Why do you want to look at gore you freak!"
"oh you complain about violent fight scenes removed form an action movie, are you a thugs or something...do you get off on violence?"
No it's not about fapping or whatever (and even if it was so the fk what, they bought the rights to it knowing what it was so why change it?), it's about fiddling with the game they bought the rights to with a userbase expecting it as it was. If they originally made the game this way then leave it that way, or don't make it that way in the first place. Ncwest are basically saying NCsoft are a misogynistic, sexist and hateful company towards women if these changes are really necessary.
Oh and it's also about NCwest LYING to gamers, saying they would do no censorship and then doing it anyway. Big time (changing idle styles, removing underwear, removing quests, changing race names, changing dialogue), and these are only the ones players spotted because they sure aren't being open about this until they get caught.
If you want to be a defender of the rubbish these guys are pulling don't complain when in a few years time they start "westernizing" games you care about to remove violence, or blood, or brutality or whatever.
I am an adult, i do not give a fluff about korean teenteasing, and believe it or not i actually like one of the new storylines that were born from the censorship, because i think it is much more engaging than the senseless pervy teasing of the original quest.
But this is about principles, this is about a bunch of friggin tumblrinas "right out of uni" special SJW snowflakes being given a position where they can edit the games i play literally based on nothing but "muh feelz" and it is frankly insulting.
What particularly irritates me is this notion that I must be some sort of slavering neckbeard pervert or 15 year old because I happen to like these characters and that certain sense of style and I don't want the integrity of that style to be perverted itself by the perpetually offended. (For one, I'm a 31 year old married woman with children.)
"No no no, that's far too sensible. Can't be giving anyone a choice about the content they experience. No no no, they get what we tell them because we know best about all that is right and good and decent in the world."
It's at this point that I wish I could punch these people in the face, repeatedly, as hard as possible, for a very, very long time. Not very PC of me but the thought puts a big old smile on my face.
In a way we do still have a choice. You always have the option of playing the KR version with the english patch.
mmorpg junkie since 1999
The changes also do appear quite heavily driven by "political correctness"; story changes to take out morally grey areas, name changes because the names might sound like racial slurs (I don't even know what a coon is (its actually a brand of cheese where I live, lol), and I wouldn't even pronounce Kun that way).
Also, dialogue from the editorial team indicates that they just made some major changes based on "what they felt", its not like the company did some major research to determine whether making those changes would result in higher sales. I would prefer not to have art censored by a group of young pruds, although I am sure they will be working hard to vandalize much more art in the future.
That said one person said they felt a certain way and it was only pointed out one quest as being changed. There are people using the lingerie in a bad example here as it's been explained that people complained about the lingerie on the character creation screen when it was the default underwear because it messed with the visuals when doing body modifications during character creation. This has been explained a few times why they changed that, yet that isn't good enough for some people.
The thing is that the game really isn't that censored at all and outside of one instance with a question which was questionable for the western audience in general just because of how prudish we are as a society, i mean even if you take SJW and feminists out we are still very very very very prudish market when it comes to sexual things particularly anything involving some amount of "force" being portrayed. The lingerie in question is still an option for you to run around in and wear if you want it, it's in the cash shop and thus it's not really censored they just changed the default.
Which if you think about it making it an outfit allows you to wear it as an actual armor instead of just having it be an underwear item... That said to the people that want to act like it is censored this was taken during the last beta.
To further add into it that isn't actually what the team said. What that person actually stated was that if he had a choice between two things he'd always air on the side of non misogynistic views. He was explaining his reasoning for that one quest being changed and his views. That doesn't mean a bunch of other content was changed other than that one quest. We also need to consider that localization almost always changes around story dynamics and the stuff, I've seldom run into a situation where it hasn't unless the game was often a cash grab rush job.
I am pretty sure that Activision would have liked to have released COD/BOPS 3 with a 15 ratings too, but, due to the nature and content of the game it received an 18 rating, pretty sure Debby does Dallas also has an 18 rating too.
So back to BnS, they could have released it with just language changes, no problem, it would have had an 18 rating, but that shouldn't surprise anyone, and that way nobody would be complaining about censorship, instead, this is about the developer aiming for a younger age group, and guess what, that means that some of the content has to be 'edited' for the designated audience, in the case of 'Films' like Debby does Dallas, imagine how much would have to be removed/edited in order for it to pass even a 15 rated classification.
So, this isn't about Censorship, its about the developer trying to get a younger audience for their game, if you don't like it, then petition them to have the game aimed for a more mature audience, and you can then have it, as intended as an 18 rated game. If you aren't prepared to do that, then, honestly, you don't care enough about the game anyway so stop complaining.
More than one quest has been changed and the Kun thing apparently was actually changed because it sounded like coon (oh my god it sounds the same as a brand of cheese, definitely justifies the change). The thing about Kun - t may or may not also be true.
The editorial team has publicly said: "When I'm presented with the choice of writing a character and story line that is pretty reprehensible without it being critical commentary on his actions, or reworking it to a more positive direction that isn't going to make me and others squirm, I'm not exactly going to hesitate to go for the latter"
I can hardly believe a serious writer would ever utter something like that. You know what that means? They have gone through the story and anything that is basically interesting they have changed to some feel good version. To me its just outrageous and horrible to see people like that let loose on a work of art.
Again I doubt it will make any major difference to the game's sales either way, but that in itself is sad. Pointless changes and now most people in the West will never get to experience the actual story because "it made pretty much everyone on the team really uncomfortable".
I agree they should have given people the choice.