A new gameplay feature for impending licensed RPG South Park: The Fractured but Whole has – predictably – began ruffling feathers from the moment the news broke online.
Takeaways:
- The second entry in the series, following The Stick of Truth, will pack a difficulty slider represented by an avatar whose skin tone shifts according to how tough a challenge players want.
- Move the slider to the left for an easier play experience and said avatar’s skin will gradually brighten until becoming a Caucasian white at its furthest notch, while heading towards the right will have the opposite effect, eventually transforming the innocuous South Park resident into a black kid instead.
- Thankfully our ever-sensitive ally Cartman provides a rapid consolation on the superheroic battlefield The Fractured but Whole lays before you shortly afterwards, assuring us that the paradoxically inclusive choice “doesn’t affect combat” so much as “every other aspect of your whole life”, in this case meaning the amounts of money available to your character and how other NPCs react to them.
Such ‘gags’ are always bound to split cultural commentators down the middle, eliciting shrugs or chuckles from just as many schools of criticism as they will cries of outrage.
Let us know your thoughts below, and stay tuned for all the gossip on The Fractured but Whole as we near its sure-to-be-explosive-in-more-ways-than-one launch on PS4, Xbox One and PC this October 17th.
South Park has always pushed the envelope for EVERYTHING. No one person is safe, no religion is safe, and certainly not current social issues are safe if South Park is around to poke fun (or possibly bring to light?) at these things.