Ubisoft's The Division 2 has had another mishap with art in the game. While the last piece noticed by the community appeared to leak the location of the next Assassin's Creed game, the latest catch instead contains a homophobic slur. There's since been a Ubisoft apology issued, and the content has been removed, but there hasn't been any comment about how it got into the game in the first place.
The slur in question that Ubisoft has since had to remove from the game is actually an image of a policeman eating a donut. The controversial slur in question is some text on the badge of the policeman: the badge number spells out "FA6607". It doesn't take a genius to note that it's a very thinly veiled way to hide a common homophobic slur.
As reported by PC Gamer, the Ubisoft apology has amounted to not a whole lot more than a note that the homophobic slur had slipped through the company's content review process. The studio mentioned that the content was offensive and that they had "removed the image from the game via a patch on Thursday, April 11". However, there was no information provided by Ubisoft about how the design was approved and how it actually made it to the final version of the game. Here's the full statement from Ubisoft:
"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. We apologize 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."
While the offending image is arguably difficult to notice in the game, the fact remains that it was still there and that someone at Ubisoft likely had to sign off on the inclusion of the asset in The Division 2. It's a small piece of art which is highly stylized, but that doesn't detract from the clearly offensive nature of the content. There has been some debate floating around the internet about whether or not removing the offending image is tantamount to censorship, but that conversation seems to ignore the larger realities of the political messaging that is prevalent within the game as a whole.
The Ubisoft apology was undoubtedly a necessary PR move in the wake of the nature of the slur, but it's also interesting to note that the company mentioned that it would be reviewing its content curation processes to avoid mishaps like this in the future. The community has yet to pinpoint other instances of problematic content within the game after its recent patch, but it's likely that Ubisoft is going to be on high alert for this for the foreseeable future.
Source: PC Gamer