Ubisoft Doubles Down On Woke Activism With Trigger Warning In Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Jack Dunn

Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition doesn’t start with a bang; it starts with an absurd and pointless trigger warning. YouTuber, journalist, and culture critic Vara Dark noticed the absurd trigger warning upon opening her newly purchased Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition game. She posted on X: “I love buying games and seeing TRIGGER WARNINGS saying there’s “harmful content” as soon as I open them!”

The trigger warning reads: “Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition brings the original experience to today’s platforms. The story and gameplay remain as they were when the game launched in 2003. As such, some characters and cultural references contain stereotypes. Ubisoft acknowledges the negative impact of their representation. Much like in the game itself, we keep on learning about our world, our games, and the stories and representations within them.”

The most absurd element of the trigger warning is Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition, which is set on a fictional planet with fictional characters, like walking talking pigs. It does not have anything to do with real-world cultures. This is another example of Ubisoft’s woke strategy after the company’s been hammered by gamers for their addition of a black samurai in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.

The game’s official description reads: “As Jade - a penniless young photographer/lighthouse keeper/orphan caregiver/martial artist - players will set out alongside her adoptive uncle Pey'j to explore Hillys, a watery planet under constant threat from the DomZ aliens. Initially looking to use Jade's photography skills to document local wildlife and earn enough to keep the lights on, the two quickly find themselves recruited by a clandestine news network working to expose the truth behind the DomZ attacks. Incorporating a blend of gameplay from a variety of genres, Beyond Good & Evil lets players knock aliens around with Jade's daï-jo staff in fluid combat encounters, sneak past lethal guards in tense stealth sequences, and pilot a hovercraft to battle massive creatures and win explosive races. There are competitive minigames to master, secrets to uncover, and a story of resistance that will take players from the streets of Hillys to the vastness of space.”

This raises the question, is the trigger warning simply an overt signal by Ubisoft to signal their commitment to the woke cult, or do they believe that pigs were under-represented and negatively stereotyped in previous iterations of Beyond Good & Evil? There is also the small matter of trigger warnings being useless. A 2013 study on the effectiveness of trigger warnings found that: “Warnings had no effect on affective responses to negative material or on educational outcomes. However, warnings reliably increased anticipatory affect. Findings on avoidance were mixed, suggesting either that warnings have no effect on engagement with material or that they increased engagement with negative material under specific circumstances.”

So why did Ubisoft add a trigger warning to Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition? Let us know in the comments, and restack this post so more gamers can read!