Slashdot Mirror
ESRB Changes Oblivion's Rating to 'Mature'
kukyfrope writes "Perhaps reacting based on the debacle that was the 'Hot Coffee' scandal, the ESRB today changed the rating on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion from Teen to Mature. From the article: 'The content causing the ESRB to change the rating involves more detailed depictions of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating, as well as the presence of a locked-out art file or 'skin' that, if accessed through a third party modification to the PC version of the game, allows the user to play with topless versions of female characters,' said the ESRB in a release."
I saw a video of this nude patch a few months ago, check it out here.
If i wanted to hear bullshit, i'd go to church.
Did you even read the entire summary?
The "art file or 'skin'" was already present in the game, locked out or otherwise.
The third party tool gave you access to what was already there... exactly like GTA & their hot coffee disaster.
What the ESRB is trying to tell game makers is that they need to stop including postentially sexual content on the game discs, even if it's "locked out".
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The parent is correct, the underlying skin of 'female upper body, nude' was only included to allow additional clothing to look correct when it exposed portions of what the bra was covering.
The nude female skin included in the file isn't even female. The proportions are quite distinctly male as evidenced by the placement of the nipples being way too far appart and thus rendering them on the side of the breasts rather than the front when it is placed over the female upper body mesh in the mod. The mesh file of the supposed nude still distincly shows the folds of the bra (rendered normally as a folded up, dirty off-white cloth going around the upper body) giving the topless characters lumpy shadows where the bra was.
In other words, this was not a 'hidden' nudity thing. The males can be rendered without shirts and clothing made with exposure of various parts of the upper body. The female was made the same way, and since the nipples would never be shown, it didn't matter that they used the male skin 'skin' for it as well.
Just to reiterate, the nude texture was included into the game because Oblivion's clothing and armor textures/meshes would not always look correct with a bra texture going straight through it. The bra mesh would also cause clipping and it would be rather clunky to retexture it with every armor. Rather than make some convoluted script that checks skin tone and modifies the existing texture, Bethsoft used a much simpler solution.
I think that the presence of nipples are the foremost concern for those who object to the "nudity" nipples are apparently the most offensive part of the mammary and must therefore never be shown to children of any age. But if we consider the role a nipple might play in the modelling of armor and clothing (although I will admit that I have no experience in this matter and will defer to the knowledge of anyone who does), such as providing a boundary for how far the neck of a peice of attire can go. The nipple play a part in determining where a seam might be placed on a blouse or an indentation on a tight fitting dress.
Unlike the Hot coffee mod, which was an intentional inclusion of graphic content, Oblivion's mesh and texture were created to make the game run more smoothly and quite possibly as a modder's resource. The "nipple" on the topless mesh is barely distinguishable from the rest of the breast, and Bethsoft goes to great lengths to make it's content appropriate for younger audiences. For example, in Daggerfall (and Arena?) the book series known as "The Real Barenziah" had very graphic sexual content, Which they removed from Morrowind (and Oblivion) and replaced with the phrase "this passage has been removed by order of the church" They also removed all nude daedra or provided more consevative versions of them for Morrowind. I don't think Bethsoft ever intended for the mesh and texture to be used for this purpose, and while Bethesda certainly expected nude content to become available, they should not be obliged to provide such content for ESRB screening purposes.