Obsidian Entertainment’s Pillars of Eternity, released last week, has hit the ground running with rave reviews from media outlets. However, its launch hasn’t been without a few kinks.
Aside from the usual bugs that have been steadily been ironed out, most recently via a substantial patch, Pillars of Eternity drew some flak when players noticed an offensive poem within the game world.
Throughout the world of Dyrwood, players can come across a number of tombs and graveyards containing the usernames of the various people who crowdfunded Pillars of Eternity to the tune of over $4 million. Many of the names were accompanied by a short epitaph submitted by the users in question.
One such epitaph, from a user named Firedorn Lightbringer, read:
Here lies Firedorn, a hero in bed,
He once was alive, but now he’s dead
The last women he bedded, turned out a man
And crying in shame, off a cliff he ran.
The epitaph, seen by some as offensive to transgendered people, was pointed out by several users. Obsidian took notice and announced that they had removed it from the game in the recent afore-mentioned patch, but out of respect to the backer who wrote it, asked him to write something else to replace it:
It’s come to our attention that a piece of backer-created content has made it into Pillars of Eternity that was not vetted. Once it was brought to our attention, it followed the same vetting process as all of our other content. Prior to release, we worked with many of our backers to iterate on content they asked to be put into the game that didn’t strike the right tone.
In the case of this specific content, we checked with the backer who wrote it and asked them about changing it. We respect our backers greatly, and felt it was our duty to include them in the process. They gave us new content which we have used to replace what is in the game. To be clear, we followed the process we would have followed had this content been vetted prior to the release of the product.
The epitaph for Firedorn Lightbringer has now been altered to read:
Here lies Firedorn, a bard, a poet
He was also a card, but most didn’t know it
A poem he wrote in jest was misread
They asked for blood, so now he’s just dead
Classy.