Mordhau‘s Developers Walk Back a Proposed Toggle Enabling Players to Turn off Nonwhite Characters

Medieval combat simulator Mordhau, developed by rookie indie company Triternion, has been widely praised by games media for its complex, satisfying combat and impressive physics engine. What escaped notice, however, was the culture of virulent hatred the game fostered with its symbolically charged crusades theme, permissive moderation, and complete lack of an in-game reporting function to push back against toxic behavior.

All this noxiousness has been thrown into sharp relief by an interview with Mordhau game developers Mike Desrosiers and Andrew Geach published by PC Gamer that investigates why racism is allowed to run rampant in the game. While there’s room for a lot of nuance when it comes to fostering diversity and addressing hate in videogames, the interview demonstrates the developer’s tone-deafness with even the basics of this discussion.

For one, there’s the matter of character customization. While Mordhau offers a highly customizable experience in armor and play-style, when it comes to race and gender, the game restricts you to white men, though Triternion has plans to introduce more diverse options in the future.

When asked about the absence of diverse characters, the developer team responded that if they decided to add “a Middle Eastern person or a female or a black person,” they’d do it “properly,” by creating “new scalps, new texturing” for them. While that’s nice, besides the focus on scalps as signifiers of race and gender, Geach went on to say that the “current thinking” of the developer theme is to give players the option to disable diverse characters. The toggle would only affect the toggler’s game, so that while your opponents retain their chosen race and gender, they appear on the toggler’s screen as white men.

Triternion claimed on Twitter Tuesday that they never had plans to “add a toggle to hide other ethnicities.”