ES4: Oblivion - The Breasts That Broke the Game

Slashdot's Michael Zenke is back at The Escapist with an article on Oblivion's re-rating by the ESRB back in May 2006:

Halfway through 2006, a huge story went unnoticed by game journalists. Barely a cursory glance or raised eyebrow marked its passage. Early in May the Entertainment Software Rating Board quietly changed Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's rating from "T" to "M," forcing a recall and re-labeling of the game, and costing Bethesda a fortune. The problem? Bethesda had nothing to do with it.
A modder unaffiliated with the game's developers, working on her own time, manipulated art assets in the game, rendering female characters topless, and distributed her work over the internet. It was an act beyond Bethesda's control but to the ESRB objectionable content is objectionable content, and it needed to be weighed, measured and rated.

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More information.

Bethesda had nothing to do with it.

A modder unaffiliated with the game's developers, working on her own time, manipulated art assets in the game, rendering female characters topless, and distributed her work over the internet.

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The writer claims this is the incident which caused the ESRB to change the rating from a T to an M. However, he later goes on to admit that it was the amount of Blood and Gore that actually did it.

During the course of the ESRB's examination, however, the organization saw even more it didn't like. Though the Topless Mod didn't change anything but textures on female NPCs, the ESRB found "more detailed depictions of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating." That, combined with the revelation that the skin texture was among the files shipped with the game on release gave the Board cause to approve a rating change from "T" to "M.

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There is a dispute whether it was something that shipped with the game or not.

Patricia Vance, speaking for the ESRB, fired back: "It is obviously unfortunate for everyone involved that no one at Bethesda deleted this file [the nude textures] before the game went Gold, contributing to our changing the rating after the game was released. ... Our raters re-reviewed the game ... and felt that the game was deserving of a Mature rating.

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"Bethesda can not control tampering with Oblivion by third parties," a representative said.

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This article is trying to make too much of this incident and is stretching the facts. It appears to me that, if anything, this mod raised the alarm and caused the game to be reinvestigated.

And in the course of that investigation if they didn't find the one thing, which Patricia Vance implies they did, they found other problems, which no one disputes.

The only problem here seems to be that the ESRB didn't investigate the program enough the first time to see what would was obvious to players; it shouldn't be rated T.

The rating is correct now.

My question is was how was Oblivion able to get a T rating in the first place. Clearly the ESRB didn't look hard enough the first time. But it goes to question, do these companies have any influence in these decisions?

We've had this discussion here before when this incident first came to light. For this article to rehash to me speaks more of him than it does of anything else since the parties involved, Bethesda and the ESRB, declined to comment on it.

Lucky Day said:

The writer claims this is the incident which caused the ESRB to change the rating from a T to an M. However, he later goes on to admit that it was the amount of Blood and Gore that actually did it.

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Exactly, what a useless article ... at GamerDad both myself and the XBOX reviewer rated the game as Adult and said that the ESRB had it wrong, that it should be M ... and suddenly it was.

The way I understood it was that it was actually on the CD, just in an unused texture pack. This makes it understandable that nobody found it right away, but also justifiable to change the rating.

As for nobody noticing or writing any articles... well, no. Maybe it's just 'cause I'm in the industry, but... I read a few. There was some spirited discussion around the office. I didn't see it get ignored.

It felt like a bit of projection to me. I didn't ignore the issue, and I've never played the frelling game.

My guess is that a lot of companies shoot to barely (not (necessarily) as in naked) make it into the T rating, pushing the limit as much as possible.

I was active at the TES forums at the time, and I can tell you the boards were buzzing. Everyone chimed in with an opinion. I don't remember it being ignored at all. Even the mainstream media picked up on it, reporting it as whacky trivia.

A California politician, I forget his name, caught wind of it and got excited. He referenced the topless mod in a speech and called for stronger government oversight and stiffer game ratings. The key point being, the nude texture was already in the original game. It was just covered up by another texture (a bra). The modder made the bra removeable.

Bethesda responded with a press release, promising to address the issue. Modders became concerned, wondering how Beth intended to limit access to original game textures.

The whole thing just blew over. The rating was changed, and that was that. The next official patch changed something, but modders dealt with it, and it was no big deal.

Afterall, politicians have to get up in arms about something!! What else in the world is more important than half-naked females in a computer game!!!! <imagine a sarcastic emoticon here>

(1) The texture in question was the texture for the male model, who had a bare torso. The modder just put that on the female model, which yielded somewhat weird-looking nipples, but nipples all the same.

(2) ESRB doesn't "investigate" games. Instead, the publisher demos them to them. It's the publisher's responsibility to make a demo that accurately represents the kind of content in the game likely to affect the rating. If the publisher doesn't do this and something new turns up post-release, it runs the risk of having the game re-rated as this time.

Long live America! (in this special case "game ratings")

For their lousy translation the game should have become an rating not under 18. Such a cruel bullshit I've never seen. Calling a heal spell fireball isn't something I could really understand. And they never fixed that. If there haven't been several fan fixes we would have a text translation nobody would understand. It seems as if Bethesda payed some college students to make a rough translation. I think Jimmy Pop Ali's German ist better than this one.

I always thought the ratings for games were BS anyways. My parents decided what was ok and not ok to buy, not some faceless company. Also these game ratings depend on what country your in, for example more blood and guts is ok for US but not ok for UK. More nudity is ok in UK and not ok for US. Like Corwin said "politicians have to get up in arms about something!! What else in the world is more important than half-naked females in a computer game!!!! " I'm curious though if the christian right or republicans have had anything to say about this.

The problem is that most parents aren't gamers, and probably aren't that interested in following the gaming press either. They need something to give them an idea of what's in a game. Ratings are one way of doing this. The only trouble is that generally the wrong things get rated.

The extreme 'christian' (I use the term VERY loosely) right would likely say ALL computer games are EVIL, while the moderate 'christian' right would simply say most are evil!! They would not pick and choose between games; afterall, to do that, they would actually have to play them and risk finding they were really fun and enjoyable!!!!

PS, The Looney Left is no better!!

See the opinion spectrum as a ring rather than a line, and the loony 'ends' actually meet.

Hehe funny how boobs always cause such a fuss in the u.s. Really I can't even take this news story seriously, its just so absurd I quess Violence is okey, but seeing a niple is very harmfull?

skavenhorde said:

I always thought the ratings for games were BS anyways. My parents decided what was ok and not ok to buy, not some faceless company. Also these game ratings depend on what country your in, for example more blood and guts is ok for US but not ok for UK. More nudity is ok in UK and not ok for US. Like Corwin said "politicians have to get up in arms about something!! What else in the world is more important than half-naked females in a computer game!!!! " I'm curious though if the christian right or republicans have had anything to say about this.

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In the US, its the left that goes after video games, using them to explain things like the Columbine shootings and other nonsense. Mrs. Clinton is a leader in the anti-video game arena, as well as Gore's VP pick, Lieberman.

From what I remember of this at the time, it wasn't anything to do with the nudity at all, as pointed out.

It was the gore and violence that ESRB complained about, saying that Bethesda had not represented the game properly. Bethsoft fired back that they'd already selected the most violent options out of the list.

I think the point was correctly that the demo hadn't represented it fully, even though they'd selected the most violent category.

In the UK, there wasn't a problem and no ratings were changed - it remained at '15'.

Don't they test the game by themselves? (<-- grammatically correct?)

Avantenor said:

Don't they test the game by themselves? (<-- grammatically correct?)

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No! That is a major flaw. The publisher submits a video showing the game with content highlighted.

bob12 said:

In the US, its the left that goes after video games, using them to explain things like the Columbine shootings and other nonsense. Mrs. Clinton is a leader in the anti-video game arena, as well as Gore's VP pick, Lieberman.

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Not to mention Tipper Gore. However, the right goes after video games too -- Jack Thompson being the most notorious example. Everybody seems to hate gamers there.

When was the Xbox version re-rated?

I recall some furror due to the re-rating only being applied to the PC version, while the Xbox was left unchanged. That brought up complaints that the violence and flaming, immasculated corpses were not the cause of the re-rating. The complaint was that if only the PC version was being re-rated, it had to have been due to the nipples and modability -- and that bodded ill for the future of editors being included in PC games.

Was the Xbox re-rated at a later date, or were people conveniently ignoring it to bring up another flamewar?

That's about the time I completely gave up on the official Bethsoft boards, so the only news I saw was on boards with a decided anti-Beth bent.