Triternion - developer of medieval game Mordhau - has come under scrutiny recently after a PC Gamer article talked about the racism and toxic behaviour that was driving players away, and now there has been some confusion about whether or not they're allowing players to disable the appearance of non-white characters.
"We do not, nor have we ever, had plans to add a toggle to hide other ethnicities or "disable characters that aren't white" in Mordhau. Any claims to the contrary are false. Official statement coming soon," the team writes on Twitter.
But that seems to contradict with what developers Mike Desrosiers and Andrew Geach told PC Gamer originally, saying the following when asked about filtering out different characters, like female options:
"That goes back to a similar situation as the chat filters," Desrosiers says. "Whatever stance we take officially, some group of people are going to be upset with us. And so, ideally we'd put the power in the players' hands, and give them the option to enable and disable different things."
In a later update to the PC Gamer article (posted after Triternion's Twitter response), we heard a bit more about the issue of disabling certain characters in-game. PC Gamer asked about "maybe adding that and then giving the option for players to disable" options like female black characters, before also asking "Is that the current thinking?", to which Geach says:
"Yeah, that seems to be the current thinking. It's not set in stone, it depends how our community is in the future. Maybe if it calms down in the future, the game still has a lot of players, a lot of toxicity, a lot of racism, a lot of politics, everything, people argue in chat about all sorts of nonsense."
The plans to toggle female characters on and off has already been discussed back in April on Steam, but this claims to address concerns over realism:
"We are still looking into adding female characters post release as was promised, if added they will be on par with the rest of the game and implemented properly to ensure they are not a detriment to the atmosphere of the game. The voice acting especially will be crucial for this."
"The realism complaint is valid, so when we add them we might add a simple client-side toggle (for both female and male characters) which would let you disable them."
Regardless, in the same set of tweets, Triternion does add that "we at Triternion, and as a small indie team, have a lot to learn when it comes to dealing with toxicity/racism in a large community."
What do you make of this situation?