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I think the problem is with skulls in particular?
Here's a pretty iconic item, original art and the art in the Chinese version:
Nope it's completely false.
Age of Wushu:
I'm not that far into Wukong yet but there's a "Baigujing" Skeleton Spirit in the Journey to the West novel that might make an appearance later depending on what they've drawn on.
It's literally another anti China myth generated by western developers being over cautious about Chinese regulators in the changes they make for their China localisations.
This... this can't be true, can it? Blizzard must have spent thousands of man hours censoring skulls and bones out of WoW alone... for no reason? They're WAY too cheap for that.
I've also seen it said that skeletons aren't banned by the government, but removing them is still recommended because it might offend certain groups in China, so the censorship is more along the lines of what you might do not to offend Christians in America.
What I do know is that the guidelines as written are pretty vague, so it's also possible the interpretations have changed over time and that Chinese people living in that culture are probably far more aware of where the line gets drawn.
It was likely a pre-emptive move on Blizzard's part just to avoid any kind of controversy. In theory the Chinese government does have the power to censor them, so they could respond to pressure from groups in society and fuck Blizzard over. It being 15 years ago and everything being so much less certain back then probably contributed.
Naturally actual Chinese companies know what's up and also understand that somebody else in the Chinese government has a vested interest that they don't get fucked over by the censors.
The skeletons are likely just a set asset that they sprinkled around. Just modify all of that asset to something else and you’re rid of the skeletons.
I’d be surprised if there were more than a handful of bespoke skeletons in all of wow.
Prepare to be surprised, I guess. I have a friend who runs the Chinese client because it hides the bones that show on her Undead character model, and there's like hundreds of different textures and models for skulls and shit, all over the place. Sometimes they're smoothed out to look like rocks, sometimes they're piles of dirt, sometimes (shockingly often) things are swabbed to bags of wheat. There's like a few dozen enemies that are some variety of skeleman, and they're all changed into some other model. Like obviously they're USUALLY existing models, but sometimes not. And as someone who made a game, I know that even doing texture / model swapping at that scale most certainly takes a ton of time, especially since they're still doing it to this day.
I'm just saying, knowing how much Blizzard sucks, I can't imagine they'd do all that if it wasn't actually a big deal. Not that I ever thought it was any more or less silly than the things you can't show western audiences.
By some kind of capitalistic magic, big financialized companies are not cheap at all, on the contrary they are quiet extravagant with their spendings. They butcher the job and make it look like they ran out of money but that's actually just deadlines bullshit by the marketing department. In reality, those big publishers just burn piles of cash on everything they deem remotely useful during the process. There's a guy on YouTube who explains this in a video on why big studios don't use Blender when the competition is so goddamn expensive
they changed them into bread
Oh wow, would you look at that. Big
for all the devs that perpetuate this nonsense.
8c HH now thats value