Cyberpunk 2077 will not be banned in Australia when it is released in six months, according to CD Projekt Red Krakow Studio head, John Mamais.
In an interview with Stevivor, Mamais spoke in detail about whether the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 will be banned by Australia’s strict video game rating standards or receive an R18+, their highest rating. Unlike the US, where video games are recognized by the law as a protected form of free expression, the Australian Classification Board has the authority to refuse to classify a game that effectively makes it unsellable by Australian retailers. The most common reasons for a game to receive a ban are if the content is too violent, glamorizes drug use or is deemed too sexually explicit. These three themes are common in Cyberpunk, as a genre, and from what has been shown of Cyberpunk 2077, the game will not break from tradition. Mamais concedes as much in the interview,
“And because it’s Cyberpunk there are some elements of [drug use] in the game. There’s hard drugs and soft drugs, and body enhancing drugs and all kinds of drugs. And there’s sex, and strip clubs. You can have sex with people but there’s no sexualized violence. The player may witness something in the game or hear about something, but we’d never put the player in the position where they’d [do that to a person]. It’s just kind of tasteless.”
Despite all this, Mamais is confident Cyberpunk 2077 will be rated R18+ without needing to be censored.
“So as far as I know we should be clear for release in Australia. We’ve censored stuff before; we’ve had to cover up nipples for Japan, and you can’t show decapitations in Japan so we had to do some censoring for Japan. We also had to do some censoring for Middle Eastern territories for The Witcher. We wanna be out everywhere, but we don’t wanna censor it. I think though if we have to, we’ll do something.”
Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn’t be the first CD Projekt Red game to be run afoul of the Australian rating agency, either. In 2011 The Australian version of The Witcher 2 was edited in order to fit the M15+ rating. Specifically, a scene where Geralt is offered sex as a reward for completing a quest was edited so that he automatically refuses the reward. But in spite of all this Mamais says his team is ready for whatever happens with the board.
“Don’t worry, it’ll be out here [Australia], there’s a big spreadsheet of potentially damaging things in the game and it looks like none of that will be an issue. Famous last words, but I think it’s OK.”
Cyberpunk 2077 is scheduled for a worldwide release on April 16, 2020, so long as the Australian Classification Board agrees with the head of the game’s development.
Source: Stevivor