Obsidian’s action RPG The Outer Worlds, launched last week, has been declared quite the success. Rave reviews, delight from gamers who have started making their way through the title and news of a Switch version set for 2020 have served to craft a well-received package overall.
Over on Reddit (where else) a list of the words you can’t use when creating your Outer Worlds character has been gaining some traction. There’s a host of notable racial slurs and other potentially problematic terms detailed, and a sprinkle of mysterious words that might make more sense if you spoke, say, fluent German. Elsewhere, there are some familiar saucy words that can be firmly placed in a more silly column.
However, also included in the list of banned character words are things like ‘muslim’, ‘transgender’ and ‘gay’, which has prompted a discussion on why The Outer Worlds would cast the net on censored words so wide. After all, it’s a single player game, not multiplayer. Choosing a massively offensive character name wouldn’t look good on shared screenshots or popular livestreams, for sure, but for many players, there was certainly some confusion and a little upset surrounding a few of the words selected for the ban list.
For others, there was a sense of surprise that there were any banned words at all, either citing ‘free speech’ or admitting that they’d already managed to create a specific bespoke name.
“I wasn’t even aware there was a filter because it let Buttplug through the first time,” commented one.
You can see a huge chunk of the banned words discovered so far right here.
Wireframe #25 is out now
