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The Dead Rising remaster no longer gives you points for “Erotica” creepshots because it’s not “required” or “appropriate"Capcom insist the change isn’t “a response to a changing cultural climate”
Capcom insist the change isn’t “a response to a changing cultural climate”
Image credit:Capcom
Image credit:Capcom
The Erotica tag has, however, been chopped from theDead Rising Deluxe Remaster, in what Capcom gingerly suggest isn’t “a response to a changing cultural climate”, but expressive of the view that earning points from such photos is not “an appropriate reward for survival and not a skill required of a journalist trying to stay alive”.
The tag’s removal accompanies some necessary tweaks to the game’s writing and quests. According toVG247, an early-game quest where a rival photographer tasks you with taking a high quality Erotica shot has been exchanged for an Outtake photo request instead.
“Additionally, when considering Frank’s situation, it is not an appropriate reward for survival and not a skill required of a journalist trying to stay alive for the next 72 hours during a zombie apocalypse,” it continues. “However, players will still have the right to choose their picture subjects freely, and even though they won’t receive points, it is up to them to decide what photos they will take to represent their journey.”
Gosh, there’s a lot of very careful talking-around-the-subject going on in that statement. The unspoken gist, I think, is “we don’t want to have a mechanism in our game that actively rewards sexual harassment, but also, we don’t want to upset the people who get mad when they can’t see"vagina bones”, so please remember that you can still take pictures of women’s bodies - you just won’t get any points for them”.
I can sympathise a bit with these last two arguments, but I have some counterpoints: firstly, Dead Rising’s satire is very often indistinguishable from giggling schoolboy wish fulfilment. Unlike with, say, player footage of butts inThe Crush House, the game never says anything complex or interesting about Frank’s professional sexism. It’s just cheap punchdown humour, gleefully modelling the fact that women arefar more likely than men to face sexual harassment.
Playing the game as a youngster, I don’t remember feeling enlightened about the workings of tabloid reporting - I just felt like the game was exhorting me to be a creep. As for the argument about preservation, the original version of Dead Rising isstill available, so if you want some Prestige in return for your snapshots of zomboobies, you can always buy that one instead.
It’s been at least a decade since I played the original Dead Rising, and it’s possible I’m skimming something important. Here’sNic’s better-informed takeon the Erotica tag’s junking, after a few hours with the new version. “It was entirely gendered and entirely vacuous, and the Remaster is better for its absence,” he wrote. “There might be an argument to be made for preservation, but the 2016 version will continue to exist, so this is the next best option if they’re not going to democratise the process and let players amass an album of artful schlong shots.”
