Explicit Nudity Discovered in ‘Watch Dogs 2,’ Player Supended for Sharing Screenshots

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Watch Dogs 2, Ubisoft’s latest blockbuster game, is available now. This hotly anticipated sequel to the 2014 original features a lighter tone, more hacking abilities, and…full frontal nudity?!

Well, apparently so. Players have discovered that the game contains more than a few naked NPC characters wondering about. This includes a stumbling naked man (NSFW) and a bunch of nudist hula-hoopers (NSFW). 

But let’s back up a bit. Before Watch Dogs 2 was released earlier this week, NeoGAF user Goron2000, who had received an early copy of the game, took a screenshot of a partially nude NPC woman in a explicit position (NSFW). However, this resulted in Goron being banned from the PlayStation Network for a week due to sharing “content of an adult or sexual nature [that] is against our Code of Conduct.” 

Here’s Goron’s NeoGAF post: 

I received my copy of Watch Dogs 2 on Saturday evening due to a mistake on Amazon Prime Now and I’ve been having a great time with the game so far. On Sunday evening I accidentally blew up a few women in a back alley with a gas pipe and then I saw *it*; someone at Ubisoft had rendered a full vagina on one (or maybe more) of the females in the game.

I took a picture of this funny oversight with the ingame camera and shared it on twitter for my friends to see and I posted it in one of the Watch Dogs early release threads on here. Cut to tonight where I can’t access any services while playing the game and then when I tried to sign in there was a very brief message about my account being suspended.

This story has gained some traction on social media, and Ubisoft has since issued a statement regarding the NPC Goron discovered.

We’re aware that one of the NPC models in Watch Dogs 2 is rendered in a way that is particularly explicit. While Watch Dogs 2 is a mature-rated game, we apologize and will update this NPC model to make it more consistent with other NPC models in the game in a patch to be released this week.  We also are working with our first-party partners to ensure that players can continue to play and share all content from the game within the bounds of the first parties’ respective codes of conduct.

This is a really fascinating story because it calls into question a number of established norms regarding nudity in video games. Specifically, where to draw the line between “explicit content” and just “nudity.” There’s apparently a number of naked characters in Watch Dogs 2, so when exactly should Sony flag a screenshot for containing content of “adult nature?” 

We’re not entirely sure, but we do know this game is rated M for Mature, so appropriate consideration by Sony and Ubisoft should have been made when including, or censoring, the content of this title. 

Either way, I think we can all agree this story somehow fits into the greater narrative of the weirdness that has been the year 2016.

2016.jpg pic.twitter.com/nUDTC7HXcj

— Ryan North (@ryanqnorth) November 15, 2016

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