Mordhau’s Player Community Comes Under Scrutiny for Being Racist, Toxic, and Homophobic
Update (7/3/2019): Triternion issued another statement on Wednesday in which the studio denied once more that an in-game toggle for female & non-white player characters was being developed. According to the statement, the two Mordhau developers that PC Gamer interviewed were artists who were “uninvolved with character development” and “ended up answering some of the questions in a misleading way”. The small indie studio also acknowledged that it has much work to do when it comes to moderating its community.
Original Story:
A PC Gamer article that was published on Monday reported on several issues in the Mordhau player community regarding toxic behavior and prejudiced comments. The game’s developers at Triternion told PC Gamer that they will ban members on the official forums for making inappropriate behavior but the developers also said that they didn’t want players to feel like they were being strictly policed.
At one point in the article, the developers also said that the team was thinking of making female & non-white player characters an in-game option that can be disabled by players. Currently, only white male characters can be made in the game.
When asked by PC Gamer about the diversity of player characters, Mordhau developer Mike Desrosiers reportedly answered, “That goes back to a similar situation as the chat filters. 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.”
“There has been endless debates about it,” Desrosiers continued, “and it attracts a lot of toxicity, a lot of stuff we’re not interested in attracting to the game itself, any more on top of what’s already present. But we’re definitely always looking at ways of expanding [our customization].”
PC Gamer asked another developer, Andrew Geach, about whether the team was thinking of a toggle option for female & non-white characters and Geach said, “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.”
However, Mordhau’s official Twitter account denied on Monday that this toggle option was ever being considered by the developer team. “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,” the tweet read. “Any claims to the contrary are false. Official statement coming soon.”
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