State Of Decay 2 remembers hitting Nazis is good, actually

I think most of us can agree that hitting the Nazis is a good thing. Heck, a bunch of great video games are based on this very premise. That’s why it was weird when a State of decomposition 2 The player discovered that the game gave the characters a negative effect for taking out the trash in their pre-apocalypse life.

In State of decomposition 2, the open-world zombie game released by Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios in 2018, each survivor you recruit is equipped with random traits that reflect both what they did before the outbreak and the effects of those lived experiences on their personality. Survivors may, for example, be “scared of rats” making them pros at pest control, offering a bonus to your maximum food storage.

Steam marines 2 developer Yik-Sian James Seow picked up State of decomposition 2 on sale in January, and quickly set up a long Twitter thread about his time with the game. But last week he noticed something strange: One of his survivors seemed to have a negative effect on the personality of the “Punched Nazis” trait. Under the flavor text, the game explained that kicking skinheads out of a local gig in a previous life indicated that the character was generally “irritable towards others” rather than, you know, just doing the right thing in that scenario.

“It would be a very bad way to find out about the State of decomposition 2 the developers are nice to the Nazis, ”Seow wrote, leaving for a series of multi-day tweets asking for Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios on the feature. It was finally blocked by the official State of decomposition account, that the studio says now was caused by a false positive in his “social listening software” after the barrage of harassment he suffered after provide public support for Black History Month.

In subsequent tweets shared yesterday, Undead Labs explained that the ‘Punched Nazis’ trait was never meant to be portrayed in a totally negative light, as it also gives survivors an enhanced combat experience and makes them’ more likely to passionately discuss their beliefs ”, the latter of which was accidentally altered with the addition of new game mechanics.

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“When the Moral System arrived, it simplified our original nuanced concept of ‘characters arguing for their beliefs’ into a basic negative moral effect, representing discord in the community,” Undead Labs wrote. “So today this trait has a positive skill bonus and red text in the UI due to the likelihood of arguing. It’s been like this for years and we never realized how confusing it seems until tonight (it’s not common, and we have over 1300 traits).

Undead Labs plans to rectify this issue in a future patch by removing the negative effect currently associated with the “Punched Nazis” trait, turning it into a positive personality indicator that it was always meant to be. Survivors will always get a boost in their combat experience, but rightly so won’t be seen as a nuisance by the community for standing up to white supremacists.

As is often the case in these situations, Seow himself was at the other end of a hate campaign by gamers who would rather defend the rights of the Nazis than delve deeply into the hatred that was allowed to foment in their communities and root it out. Building a safe and welcoming society requires that we are intolerant of intolerance, and if you can’t even do without it in a video game, well, don’t let the door knock your ass on your way out.