Ubisoft has removed a piece of art from The Division 2 that featured a homophobic slur and issued an apology about the word making it into the game in the first place.
As reported by PCGamer, the asset in question was a large piece of in-game graffiti that depicted a police officer eating a doughnut. Weeks after the game’s release, players noticed that the officer’s badge number spelled out a homophobic slur when those numbers were replaced by similar-looking letters.
It’s rare but not entirely unheard of for inappropriate content like this to go unnoticed and be released as part of a final game. Other devs have had issues with this in the past, like the white supremacist symbol that ended up in Destiny 2 or the accidental use of a photograph of an assassinated ambassador in Batman: The Telltale Series.
Even though many studios have processes in place to try and combat this kind of mistake, things still sometimes slip through the cracks, as Ubisoft says was the case with this image.
“We apologize that this image slipped through our content review processes, and we are currently reviewing them in order to avoid this kind of oversight from occurring in the future.”
As of a patch that went out today, the image as a whole has been removed from The Division 2.