Ubisoft apologises for homophobic slur in Division 2 game
Ubisoft’s The Division 2 (Screengrab/Ubisoft/YouTube)
Game company Ubisoft has issued an apology for an image in The Division 2 that contained a homophobic slur.
In a piece of street art on a building in the game, a police officer was pictured eating a doughnut while wearing the badge number “FA6607”.
The number is clearly a homophobic slur, despite being written in leetspeak – an informal code in which letters are replaced with numbers or characters.
Following the discovery of the image, Ubisoft released a statement confirming that the offending word would be removed from the game.
“It’s been brought to our attention that a piece of street art in Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 contained offensive content. We removed the image from the game via a patch on Thursday, April 11,” Ubisoft said in a statement.
“We apologise that this image slipped through our content review processes, and we are currently reviewing them in order to avoid this kind of oversight from occurring in the future.”
Ubisoft has removed the homophobic slur (Screengrab/Ubisoft/YouTube)
Ubisoft didn’t comment on how the image made it into the game in the first place.
Last year, video game maker Bethesda has banned a group of Fallout 76 players for life after they harassed other players with homophobic slurs.
Fallout 76 player AJ reported the encounter on Twitter on November 15, the day after the video game was released, asking for advice on how to report players.
He uploaded two clips showing his character chased by a group of players laughing as they make homophobic remarks.
The videos were seen more than 20,000 times and shared hundreds of times on Twitter.
“So Bethesda, how do we report people in Fallout? ChipWhitehouse, Handsandhead and I literally had our characters hunted down and killed by homophobic players,” AJ wrote in his first tweet.
Fallout 76, an RPG game set in a lawless wasteland, allows up to 24 players to talk, trade, and group-up with one another—the audio can be turned off, but there is no function preventing players from bothering other players’ characters.
