Mordhau has a serious racism problem, but the developer insists they won’t add a character filter to appease racist players.
Mordhau is a medieval sword fighting simulator game that really goes for the realism angle. This means there’s a ton of blood, gore, and decapitations, but also a hitherto unheard of level of intricacy in sword fighting technique.
Unfortunately, while pursuing the “realism” of a medieval European battlefield, Mordhau developers Triternion also made a game that appealed to a very specific and unsavory demographic of gamers.
Mordhau’s in-game chat, forums, and subreddits are full of casual racism. The most popular forum post has a blatantly racist title and shows various custom characters in all their combat livery. The post has been around since the game was in early alpha and has since gathered 2,600 comments.
And the developer has no plans of getting rid of it despite the obviously racist title. In an interview with PC Gamer, developer Andrew Geach said that “we as a team don’t find it racist or offensive, and considering the thread’s content, we find it even less so.”
Part of the reason for the developer’s reluctance to take a harder stance against this sort of behavior is for fear of accusations of censorship, but it also has to do with the studio’s size. Triternion is a small indie team that never expected their game to blow up as large as it has, and they simply don’t have the resources to police their game as much as most other game developers.
However, a worrying report emerged that Triternion would in fact pander to their game’s more racist players by including a filter that would alter female and non-white characters set to be added in a future patch. That report has since been corrected by Triternion’s official Twitter account.
“We do not, nor have we ever, had plans to add a toggle to hide other ethnicities or 'disable characters that aren’t white' in Mordhau,” the developer wrote. “Any claims to the contrary are false.”
You can read the full interview over on PC Gamer, but in the meantime, it doesn’t look like Mordhau will solve its racism problem anytime soon.