Far Cry 4 received a quiet update on PC — it took away naked men and women.
More than 10 years after its release, Ubisoft decided to censor nudity in the game for some reason, without explaining why. The update appeared without any official notes from Ubisoft. SteamDB shows a large list of modified files, so it’s a good question, what happened in the first place?
As users have noticed, Reddit the game has become more modest after the patch. For example, the woman in Shanath Arena who used to be topless now wears a bra. One player also noticed that during the same arena, the protagonist Ajay is no longer completely naked, but wears a thigh bandage. This is strange because the game is 11 years old, and by this point, its ESRB rating already included a «nudity» mark. For example, it was known that in one fight scene, a man’s genitals were briefly visible during a fall/attack.
And suddenly — change, but you can actually find the reason. Recently, Chinese investments entered the studio. Last week, it became known that Tencent — the Chinese giant that already owns 10% of Ubisoft shares — invested another $1.3 billion to create a subsidiary studio to work on Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, and Rainbow Six.
And if Tencent is really putting pressure on the publisher, then censorship seems logical: public nudity in games is prohibited in China. So it’s possible that Ubisoft is just «fixing up» old projects to avoid problems with releasing them on the Chinese market or on services like Ubisoft+.
For example, the last patch for Far Cry 4 was released in 2023, but Far Cry 3 is the most popular, also received an update on March 31 this year. So we can assume that this is not an isolated case, but some kind of internal initiative by Ubisoft to rethink» old titles. We can only guess what other «moral overhauls» we can expect.
Source: Games Radar