Will State Of Decay Be The First Game To Be Modified To Get An R18+ Rating In Australia?

State Of Decay Has Been Resubmitted To The Classification Board - Kotaku Australia

Well it has come to this.  After Saints Row 4 and State of Decay were both refused classification under Australia's (not so) adult R18+ classification both Deep Silver Games and Undead Labs stated they were considering modifying their games for resubmission.  Looks like Undead Labs got there first.

To recap, State of Decay was refused classification due to "explicit drug use" which gave players advantages in gameplay, ie rewards for taking drugs.  The drugs in questions were medications and amphetamines scavenged to help the character survive in another... zombie... apocalypse.  Seriously, how many of these can we possibly have?

So how did they get around this?  By making all the "stimulants" into "supplements".  That's right, if you have multiple lacerations and a suspected broken ankle after a narrow escape from a hoard of zombies, well a couple of vitamin B tablets and a little echinacea will see you right.

Fallout 3 suffered a similar fate back in 2008 when it was possible for your character to take morphine to treat injuries and improve health which was such a obvious attempt by Bethseda to get us all hooked on morphine (according to the classification board).  Of course in that game if you took too much you could become addicted at which point the benefits flew out the window.  So how did this evil game end up on our shelves you ask.  By renaming it to Med-X.  Yay for fictional narcotics!

Well I hope any adult Aussie Xbox owners are looking forward to playing this highly accurate re-interpretation since the Australian Classificiation Board obviously still feels that gamers who are 18 or older cannot deal with in game items named after ** gasp ** real drugs!

Or alternatively, well, you know you can play the UK version on an Australian Xbox, right?