Some enterprising coders have delved into the the code of Dead Island and found something disturbing.
In Dead Island, One of the characters is referred to as “Femninist Whore” in the coding. Yes, we are quite serious here. This is beyond ridiculous even for a mid tier developer to have in its code. But hey this is by Techland, makers of the mediocre Call of Juarez and absolutely terrible Nail’d.
It is also important to mention that Dead Island developers already had quite a bit of controversy over using a hung body in their logo. In poor taste to say the least, the game features several other prominent negative racial stereotypes. The most significant of these being the fact that a rapper plays a prominent role and one of the female characters is dressed in a totally ridiculous manner.
In the center is the aforementioned character who is a "feminist whore".
It is unclear just how much their publisher, Deep Silver, actually knew about this controversy. Their reaction has simply been to be shocked and appalled. At any rate they most likely did not know about the major coding mishap, something like that doesn’t just get through a publisher without insufficient oversight.
To be fair, what more can we expect from a company with such an absolutely horrible track record? Their best metacritic score is an 82 and trust us from having played some of their games, it is well deserved. Call of Juarez was mediocre and it was their magnum opus.
However there is something to consider for those of you who are decent indie developers. You need to get in with some of these publishers so they can see that they don’t have to put up with sub-par development. I can think of multiple coders off the top of my head who would do a better job than this. If you think I am talking about you, I probably am.
Publishers and Developers have both vowed to fix this problem, but we don’t know how that will pan out. They will have to make up for in PR what they did not in the main game. That is a tall order indeed.
Update: Techland is claiming to have sent an incomplete build which was the cause. That doesn’t really stop anyone from being bothered that their incomplete build featured language like this.
In a move surprising to none, the Valve forums also cut off access to the topic that listed the offensive code.
