Raid: World War 2, a co-op World War 2 shooter with close ties to the Payday series, is the
latest game to be censored in Germany due to Nazi content.
German law outlaws the promotion of unconstitutional symbols such as swastikas, unless they are
used for things such as education or artistic purposes.
Whilst showing symbols such as these are fine in movies, due to them being seen as artistic,
games so far have not been given the same distinction.
Due to this, all swastikas in the German version have been altered to the design shown here.
Furthermore, whilst games such as Sniper Elite 4 have shown us that Germany does allow depictions
of Hitler to be shown, as well as the use of terms such as "Nazi", it seems that the
developers of Raid: World War 2 chose to take the better safe than sorry approach when it
came to these things.
You see, in the English versions, are many cutscenes showing none other than Adolf Hitler
himself.
These cutscenes used real life actors and were completely redone for the German version,
so that the actor is no longer depicting Hitler.
Here's an example of how the scenes were altered, first up being the English version.
And then the German release.
It wasn't just Hitler who was removed though, the German version also removes many Nazi-related
dialogue.
Whilst this was normally simply changed for the German version, sometimes the devs handled
this differently.
Again, first
up
is
the English release.
Likely due to the costs involved in hiring famous actor John Cleese, the dev's beeped
out dialogue and even added black censor boxes to his cutscenes.
John plays the control office leader and has quite a few cutscenes in the game.
The dev's were actually quite intuitive in how they managed to get around censoring some
of the scenes though.
As shown here, in this behind the scenes footage, where possible they used green screens so
that they could alter the German version, without things like obstructive black boxes.
There was also no censorship to any of the game's violence or any other types of content
over in Germany.
Again though, as other games have shown, removing dialogue referencing Hitler or even showing
Hitler himself isn't needed as long as the prohibited symbols such as swastikas are not
used.
Censored Gaming is always keeping a close eye on how devs handle these matters over
in Germany and you'll also be able to find a link in the description to a video that
goes into much more detail about the censorship of Nazi content over in Germany.
To finish, though, let's take a look at a few more of the censored Hitler scenes and
the differences between the German and English versions.
Until next time, thank you for watching.