A shooter on Steam is known for its unflinching portrayal of the everyday life of a police unit. Now it’s becoming a bit milder and players hate it.
Which shooter is it about? Ready or Not is a hardcore shooter in which the operations of a special police unit are portrayed.
The game is known for wanting to be as realistic as possible in designing the levels and creating situations that real police officers could encounter. In doing so, the shooter also takes paths that some may consider borderline.
For example, there is an operation where a streamer’s apartment gets raided (keyword: swatting) and missions involving human trafficking and abuse.
Ready or Not has to change representation for console port
What is the problem now? Ready or Not will be released for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on July 15, 2025, about 2 years after its full release on Steam. In the context of the upcoming console release, the developers at VOID Interactive announced that they had to make some changes to the game for the console port that were deemed “absolutely necessary.”
While they want to stay true to the tone of the game, they still have to tone down some content in the game, such as the depiction of nudity – and this also affects the PC version, to avoid future issues when working on different game versions and to keep crossplay possible.
Why are players angry? Many players criticize the developers and the game for the changes to the PC version in Steam reviews. They want to play the game as they acquired it years ago and will not accept “censorship” due to the console porting.
The game received around 1,800 negative reviews within 4 days. One user writes: “Censoring key elements such as nudity, child abuse, and gore only leads to a ‘cleaner,’ less ‘stomach-turning’ scene that made Ready or Not so special in the first place.”
Mitigation of three elements of the game
What exactly are these changes? Overall, the changes can be summarized into three categories:
- Mutilation/Gore
- Living enemies that are shot can still be mutilated, but the mutilation of already dead enemies is no longer possible.
- Character artwork depicting torture has been toned down to appear less exaggerated.
- Nudity
- The explicit nudity of some civilians and a suspect has been toned down a bit; the characters are just slightly more dressed.
- Explicit depictions of violence/abuse against children
- An animation was changed, in which a child had a convulsive animation. The child is now sleeping/unconscious.
The change of these aspects is received so poorly by many fans of the game that they are flooding the shooter with negative reviews. Similarly, this happened recently with Borderlands. Players accused the loot shooter of spying on personal data. A dataminer then took a look to see if there was any truth to the accusation: Thousands of gamers believe that Borderlands is spying on you – Now someone speaks who analyzed the game files
