Mordhau Devs Have No Idea How To Address The Game's Controversial Community

Mordhau is, by every metric, a surprise success. It was funded through Kickstarter. It's developed by a small independent studio located in Slovenia, a small country in its own right. And since it released in April, the game has been selling like hotcakes on Steam. It's pretty much the dream of every independent developer come true.

Except Mordhau is getting a lot of attention now for all the wrong reasons. The game's community has become a hotbed for racism and sexism; a place for players to freely post slurs and complain about the "thin skins" who dare to speak up. And the developer behind the game, Triternion, appears entirely dumbstruck on how to respond.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Triternion acknowledged what it called "toxicity" in the community. But amazingly, the developer seems content to just let it be. It's well aware there are all sorts of terrible things being said in the game and even in Mordhau's official Discord. But rather than come at the issue head on, Triternion seems more focused on keeping its current base of players happy, and keeping further toxicity from bubbling up should changes be made that those players don't like.

Here's an example.

At the moment, characters in Mordhau come in one flavor: white men. Triternion has openly considered adding more character choices, such as women and people of color. There is diversity in the player base, after all. Why not represent that? Those ideas have been thoroughly trashed by a large amount of the Mordhau community; so much so, in fact, that in the PC Gamer interview, the Mordhau team floated an option that would allow players to essentially disable other types of characters, turning them all into white men again.

PC Gamer, to its credit, apparently couldn't believe that would actually be a thing Triternion did. So the site asked another developer at the studio, just to double check. And?

"Yeah, that seems to be the current thinking," the developer said. "It's not set in stone, it depends how our community is in the future. Maybe if it calms down in the future, the game still has a lot of players, a lot of toxicity, a lot of racism, a lot of politics, everything, people argue in chat about all sorts of nonsense."

So PC Gamer ran with that story. And in no time flat, Triternion came back with a response. But not one for fixing the rampant issues found in Mordhau's community. Instead, it was a denial they'd ever said the things they'd said.

"We do not, nor have we ever, had plans to add a toggle to hide other ethnicities or 'disable characters that aren't white' in Mordhau," Triternion said on Twitter. "Any claims to the contrary are false."

And that's where things stand. Mordhau's community is a mess of hate, racism and misogyny. The developers are afraid to take action. And if you report on the developers and their plans to keep the worst parts of the game's community happy, they'll simply say you're lying.

Triternion plans to issue an another more thought out statement in the future. We'll let you know when it arrives.