I felt bad for buying this game after i found out the devs are fascist bootlickers

sanitising parts to be in accordance with console standards or censoring the game, depending on who you ask.

It’s censorship, I don’t really see how one could argue (well) that it’s not. Self-censorship is still censorship, and seeing as the rationale for this change was specific platform policies, I think it’s absolutely fair to view the change happening on PC critically.

Honestly, the story and gameplay is still very dark and gritty, so I don’t think these changes would’ve had much backlash had they been this way from the start. Sometimes explicit content isn’t strictly required to get a point across, and can make a game less accessible, so I can understand games having a warning with a toggle.

But I’m very against total censorship. This reminds me a lot of when Superhot VR removed multiple scenes 4 years after the game’s release, because they were related to self-harm or suicide. Note that the game had a warning on launch as well as a toggle for this content. The linked article does a great deep dive on it, but imo I think the change really does affect the game. I got done with it (post-censorship) and did not see the hype. The game wasn’t very long and didn’t have many “whoa” moments. But shooting yourself… that’s something that you can only really do in VR, assuming it’s not coded in to a flatscreen game. And it would’ve fit into the game’s plot and themes very well.

you'd think that it would just be made available as like a settings option or something. would probably be much easier and keep everyone happy.

they still could just make it a settings option, honestly. literally so many games have them now.

It's really weird those minor changes became such a big deal, especially since there also seemed to have been real performance hits and other issues.

Everything else got drowned out by something 99.99% of people just won't care about