Popular online SWAT sim Ready or Not received a patch on Steam removing some nudity and implementing other changes designed to make it easier to port the game to consoles, which have stricter content rules. And within an hour, most of those changes were rolled back by a modder.
On July 15, developer Void Interactive released the free “Los Sueños Stories” update for Ready or Not. The update added new weapons and missions, and fixed a long list of bugs. But it also, controversially, contained changes to some in-game content. This included covering up suspects who were originally nude, as well as toning down body dismemberment caused by gunfire and explosions. These changes were implemented as part of Ready or Not’s porting process to Xbox and PlayStation. In a statement posted earlier this month about the changes, Void Interactive stated that they had only made changes required by the first-party platform holders and decided to bring these tweaks to PC to better support crossplay and avoid extra bugs that could occur when maintaining different assets for each version.
Despite considerable uproar from fans calling it “unnecessary censoring” and review bombing Ready or Not on Steam, Void Interactive still went through with the update. And then a modder quickly removed those changes and mostly returned the game on PC to its original form.
As reported by IGN, on Tuesday, roughly 30 minutes after the controversial update went live, user eman734 uploaded a mod titled “Uncensored Or Not” to Nexus Mods, bringing back the in-game nudity and gore, among other changes.
“Reverts (to the best extent we can) the high-profile ‘censorship’ changes to RoN caused by the LS Stories/Console update,” says modder eman734. “Only works for the updated version of the game. This is a mostly client side mod in our testing, refer to known issues for the problems with it.”
The modder also explained that all of the “uncensored” files in the mod come directly from a previous version of Ready or Not or are modified assets from the current build. The modder says they will “comply with any takedown request” from Void Interactive, but claim the studio has “stated they do not have [the] intention of doing so.”
Since being uploaded yesterday, the mod has been downloaded nearly 8,000 times, which is a pretty small amount compared to the nearly 10 million people who own Ready or Not.
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