Earlier this week, a Watch Dogs 2 player discovered an unusual bit of in-game scenery when he "accidentally blew up a few women in a back alley," as he explained on NeoGAF. One of them, he noticed in the aftermath, was sporting a fully-rendered (and curiously exposed) vagina. He snapped a photo with the in-game camera, as you do, and then shared it on Twitter and in a Watch Dogs 2 early release thread. We have preserved her modesty above via the time-honored hot tub tradition. But rest assured, it's all there.
Shortly thereafter, the uploader's PSN account (he plays the PS4 version) was suspended for violating rules against "content of an adult or sexual nature." The first comment in the GAF thread is, predictably, "Pics or it didn't happen," and so the pic was provided. [NSFW!] And in case there was any doubt beyond that, Ubisoft has since issued a statement confirming the presence of the vagina, as well as plans to patch it out.
"We’re aware that one of the NPC models in Watch Dogs 2 is rendered in a way that is particularly explicit,” Ubisoft told Polygon. “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.”
The PSN suspension is amusing, and utterly ridiculous—banning someone for using an in-game tool to share in-game images through the platform on which the game runs is a tremendously silly thing to do—but not especially relevant to those of us who are not, at least in theory, beholden to a single corporate overlord. But I do have to wonder how that impressively detailed piece of anatomy got there in the first place.
Not that there's anything wrong with such things (especially relative to the wall-to-wall violence uncorked by Marcus Holloway and his friends over the course of the game, but that's a conversation for another time), and I also recall seeing quite a number of male packages in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which didn't seem to attract any complaints. But surely somebody at Ubisoft could have predicted this. If Ubi was serious about Watch Dogs 2 being "a mature-rated game," with all that entails, that's great, although crotchless panties strikes me as an odd place to plant that particular flag. But then why stampede to an apology and removal the moment somebody notices?
One thing's for certain: We've come a long way from the days of Hot Coffee.
Ubisoft hasn't commented on the process that led to the inclusion of the naughty bits, but it did confirm that "the dev team is removing the explicit portion of the female model across all platforms."
