Indie developer Triternion was put under a spotlight when they were featured in a PC Gamer piece that claimed that they were losing customers due to “toxicity” and that they were considering adding a toggle switch so people wouldn’t have to see minorities or females in the game. Triternion shot down these claims with a new blog post that was published on July 3rd, 2019.

Triternion made it known right at the top of the post that they have no plans on adding a customization option that would force a white-male default. Further down into the post, they wrote…

“Shortly after launch and in internal discussions, the concept of a gender option toggle was dismissed as it would undermine the customization players work hard to create. The two artists featured in the interview were ill-informed of this decision, which was a major mistake and miscommunication on the side of Triternion; and in combination with a question on a sensitive issue of which they were underprepared to answer, strongly contributed to this misunderstanding. Our official stance is that these toggle options are out of the question.

 

“In regards to community toxicity, we do not have prior experience managing communities of this size, nor the manpower or resources that established studious can leverage. Our team consists of 11 first-time developers working remotely and volunteer moderators who try their best to curb this toxicity and behavior across all platforms, including in-game. At the moment we are stretched thin with major important content additions and unfortunately we do not have the staff nor systems in-place to moderate everything to our intended level of standards. We plan on improving in this regard. We hope our players understand our situation and will continue to place their faith in us, as improving these things will take time.”

The previous parts of the post centered around how PC Gamer came up with the statements they did when they interviewed two artists from the Triternion team. They mentioned that the artists were relying on some older information and they didn’t properly communicate what they were planning or how they were planning on implementing certain options, which led to misleading info being spread during the interview with PC Gamer.

Interestingly, they still don’t mention much about how they plan to handle female characters or minority characters, nor do they say much else about how they plan to deal with what they consider to be “toxicity”.

Most people have suggested that for the in-game options just let other players mute and block people instead of interfering with the actual player interactions. As for the female and minority options… some people made the suggestion that there could be different expansions dealing with other cultures, similar to the Mount & Blade series. That wouldn’t be a bad way to address that problem.

The main concern most people have is what sort of improvements they have in mind? A lot of people are worried that Triternion may end up listening to the wrong people and instituting overbearing censorship on Mordhau. Right now we still don’t know what exactly they’re going to do or how they’re going to do it. However, given that they’ve already banned certain players from participating in the Steam forums for “racism” and “toxicity”, it does seem like they’re trying to err on the side of the PC Gamer types rather than the original fanbase that made them rich and famous in the first place.

(Thanks for the news tip Richard Pell)

(Main image courtesy of Kraivie)