I'm really not sure where to begin with this one, so I'm just going to lay it out and then try to explain later: A recent update to Zenless Zone Zero made it impossible to get a good look at character's asses, and the blowback was so fierce developer MiHoYo reverted the change less than a day later.
The whole thing began with the release of patch 1.4, which included among its many updates this fairly innocuous sounding change: "Adjusts the Agents' display for certain angles: When viewed from specific angles, the Agent will appear faded."
What that worked out to in practice, as noted by The Gamer, is a butt filter: When players try to zoom in for a good, up-close look at their avatar's caboose, the character in question disappears. This might seem extremely inconsequential to you (it certainly does to me) but a good chunk of the Zenless Zone Zero community felt very differently:
- Zenless Zone Zero developer finally embraces its divine domain as the god of jiggle physics, goes mad, adds them to cat balls
- Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's director says 'I respect the modding community' and uses mods himself, though he still thinks we shouldn't use ones that 'detract from the intended game experience'
9/11 for goonersDecember 18, 2024
The situation wasn't any calmer on the Zenless Zone Zero subreddit. "Why is hoyo trying to stop me from seeing lycaon and lighter's dump trucks. like this gotta be some kinda crime," one redditor asked. "It feels very scummy to draw in a shit ton of players with some of the most sexualized characters ever with massive assets, then to conform to whatever order they knew they were gonna have to do only now that the most hyped up character for the game is finally out," another wrote. "What is the point of all that glorious walking jiggle if u cant even look at it," a third wanted to know, and hey, ridiculous this may be but that's a fair question.
Some pointed the finger at the government of China, which they speculate mandated the apparent censorship for reasons unknown. "It is quite unfortunate that they put so much dev effort into making good jiggles but CCP cucked them," yet another redditor contributed, which isn't the most incisive bit of analysis I've ever read, but is pretty funny.
But less than 24 hours after the update went live and the Zenless community lost its mind, MiHoYo walked it back. In a message posted on X, the studio said it was "closely monitoring feedback and suggestions from Proxies, striving to provide everyone with the best possible gaming experience," and has thus "promptly addressed and fixed several issues that appeared after the update as soon as we received feedback." The hotfix addresses a half-dozen issues, including one "where the fading effect of the 'Agent appears faded when viewed from specific angles' adjustment did not display correctly under certain circumstances."
It's not clear what actually happened here—the patch notes imply the fadeout was the result of a bug, not intentional "censorship"—but players on X quickly confirmed that butts have been unobfuscated: The cake is once again plainly visible, and there was much rejoicing.
The funniest thing that's happened to a gacha game in a long time is Zenless Zone Zero making it so if you try to angle your camera to look at your character's ass the model fades out, and the subsequent backlash at this change being so loud that the devs hotfixed it the same dayDecember 18, 2024
As for me, I have no idea what the moral of the story is here, so I've reached out to MiHoYo to see what they have to say about it. I'll update if they actually respond.
