Over its many seasons (seriously, we've lost count) TV show South Park has commented on such issues such as gentrification, immigration, xenophobia, terrorism, and the recent US election in their extremely subtle way. Now with the new South Park RPG, The Fractured But Whole, they're again touching upon the thorny issue of racism... by tying the difficulty settings into the skin colour slider on the Character Creator. Yes.
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Eurogamer investigated this issue after discovering it during a Let's Play, embedded below. Basically after creating your character in South Park: The Fractured But Whole, when you get to the part where you choose skin colour there is a slider - which also controls difficulty settings. The darker your skin colour, the harder things will be for you. Subtle. As Eric Cartman says:
"Don't worry, this doesn't affect combat. Just every other aspect of your whole life."
Ubisoft representatives confirmed that combat remains the same difficulty, but instead it affects how much money you receive and how characters treat you. Very, very clever, especially for a videogame and the sequel to an RPG where the best line in the game was "never fart on another man's balls".
Later on the Eurogamer team encountered the way deals with the new gender choices and how to fit them with the story of The Stick of Truth, where the main character supposedly was a boy the whole time. Except maybe not, as the conversation with school counselor Mr Mackey goes. Pick "girl" and a shocked Mr Mackey phones your parents, saying "so the whole King and Stick of Truth thing, she was actually a girl the entire time?" and neatly reconning the decision at the same time. We're gonna love this game.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole is the superhero-focused follow-up to The Stick of Truth, which came out 2014 and we utterly loved. We said, "not since Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham games has a developer so successfully made such an amazing title out of a licensed property, one that not only is a perfect South Park game but an incredible RPG as well."
South Park: The Fractured But Whole has a release date of October 17. Yes, that's just next month. Yes, we're super cereal.
