It’s a creative change, but perhaps not a well thought out one.Įither way though, that’s how South Park the Fractured But Whole does difficulty settings.
Why would your skin colour affect how much you get from beating someone up? You’d think that after a fight, the racial background of their attacker would be the least of someone’s priorities. That’s again an interesting setup, but I’m not sure it makes much sense here. For example, the system changes the reward you get from battles too, with darker skinned characters getting less money for defeating enemies than their lighter skinned counterparts. So anyone in that group who liked Stick of Truth won’t be happy with this either.Īnd then there’s a few design issues it brings up. They don’t want to be reminded of political issues in games.Īnd this? Well, this is as political as it gets. Remember, some people play games for escapism. It’s also controversial for those who don’t like politics too. So that’s one thing that people oppose it for. Sexual orientation, class background… none affect anything here. Which is also the case with other similar situations too. Instead, it merely changes some dialogue here and there. However, despite real life issues with prejudice there, that doesn’t affect the game.
Like, you can be transgender for example, with that option being chosen in the intro. For one thing, it also feels like it may be ‘controversial’ for the sake of being controversial.įor example, you can already be part of any number of marginalised groups in this game. Yet it still has people arguing against it.Īnd there are various reasons there. It’s a very South Park like thing to do here. It’s attention grabbing, it depicts the issue of racial inequality in a clear and easy to understand way and generally it fits the feel of the show the game is based on perfectly. In that sense, the system here works great. Controversy is part of life for them and the series. They’re known for taking on controversial subjects and trying to get people to look at them in a new way. I mean, these are the guys that make jokes about Saddam Hussein, comment on the situation with Mohammad not being portrayed in fiction and show Steve Irwin with a stingray barb stuck in his chest in a hell joke. On the one hand, it does indeed go well with South Park’s somewhat controversial brand of political commentary, with this design decision being exactly what you’d expect from Trey Parker and Matt Stone. This aims to mirror what it’d be like growing up in a struggling household without much in the way of immediate job prospects.Īdd how the game changes the way you’re referred to based on your skin colour (to try and show racism from the characters in universe), and you’ve certainly got a creative set up for a difficulty slider. For instance, enemy health and damage doesn’t go up with difficulty increases, but the amount of money you get in game does decrease. After all, it’s clearly making a political point about racial inequality (since black characters have a harder time in game than white ones), and they’ve definitely tried to reflect that in the design. Here’s a video showing it in action:Īs you can tell, it’s an… interesting system.
Put simply, the harder the difficulty, the darker their skin colour will be in the game. Namely, they’re changing the skin colour of your character the higher you ratchet up the difficulty slider. However, that’s not the case in South Park the Fractured But Whole! Oh no, in this game, the creators have decided to do something extremely controversial for the difficulty modes. But for the most part, character design remains unchanged throughout difficulty modes. They change everything else sure, and occasionally an extra mode adds a joke character for laughs (like Tofu in the Resident Evil games). Like in Ocarina of Time 3D with its Master Quest mode, or the classic NES title with its second quest.īut one thing these games don’t do on difficulty settings is change how your character actually looks.
Heck, you can even redesign the entire game to suit the new difficulty. You can change a couple of thousand variables to make things annoying, like in Super Smash Bros Brawl’s Subspace Emissary mode. You can merely up the enemy health or damage, like in Mario & Luigi Dream Team or most Zelda games. When it comes to difficulty settings in games, there are hundreds of ways mechanics can be handled to make things more interesting.