Fans angry at Microsoft forced censorship in Palworld

There were a lot of bugfixes in Palworld patch 0.1.5.1 , but what wasn't listed in the patch notes was a new censorship feature that many fans are unhappy with.

The new Palworld patch has sneaked in a censorship filter to the in-game chat which was not mentioned in the patch notes. It's a generic filter that censors swear words and other inappropriate terms with asterisks.

This was first reported on Reddit by users who were confused that the censorship was occurring on both Xbox and PC. While censorship in multiplayer games is a pretty standard industry practice, fans are more confused that it's applied to single-player mode as well.

You can no longer use those words in the in-game chat while naming your Pals, or even when naming your new world. Some players had already given names to their Pals and now find them to be censored.

"The censorship feature should be configurable on or off for single player and dedicated private servers. We also should be able to add and remove words from the dictionary." said one Reddit user.

While a well-managed censor system would be understandable, the current iteration seems to be censoring random words containing those phrases.

When asked about this on Discord, the community manage for Pocketpair admitted that the "filter is too sensitive", but he added that it's also '‘sort of outside our jurisdiction" There seems to be a larger party with policies that are forcing Pocketpair to implement the censorship filer.

Fans are now attributing this to the Xbox version of Palworld because Microsoft is a lot more strict with their multiplayer policies. To keep the game compliant with Microsoft's policies, the censorship was extended to the Steam version of the game as well.

Note that there is no proof that Microsoft is behind this decision, but fans are pointing fingers at them regardless. Palworld has been getting lots of frequent updates, so hopefully they'll resolve the filter sensitivity sometime soon. In the meantime, you might want to check out Microsoft's Palworld Xbox giveaway.