The Back 4 Blood team recently published a statement saying it will resolve an unintentional beta issue involving a zombie voice line that players have indicated sounds alarmingly close to a racial slur. Turtle Rock Studios’ upcoming zombie survival game is already amassing a following ahead of its release in October, as the Back 4 Blood beta reached almost 100,000 players concurrently during its opening weekend.

The goal of a beta test is to reveal issues prior to a game’s official release, and Back 4 Blood’s beta did exactly that. Unfortunately for both the developers and testers, several players discovered a zombie scream that sounded like a racial slur in the Back 4 Blood beta. Video footage of two Twitter users encountering the sound subsequently circulated online, showing the players expressing their shock while streaming gameplay. Although the scream’s resemblance to such an offensive term was believed to be unintentional, it was worthy of a public response from the Back 4 Blood team.

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The Back 4 Blood official Twitter page published a statement directly responding to the beta’s zombie racial slur incident, first acknowledging the issue by describing how it came about. According to the post, the game’s sound effects are “randomly combined by the system” in a way that resulted in a zombie scream sounding like a racial slur. The team emphasized that it takes such issues very seriously and apologized to the Back 4 Blood audience, saying it is sorry for “any hurt or harm this may have caused.” To close the announcement, it was guaranteed that the issue would be fixed before Back 4 Blood’s official launch.

Although the purpose of a beta is to identify and polish such in-game problems, Back 4 Blood‘s PvP mode has been at the center of recent criticism due to long in-game waiting times, frame skipping, and other graphical issues. This zombie voice line glitch adds to the list of in-game mechanics developers need to permanently fix ahead of the game’s release.

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It’s important that Turtle Rock fully address the zombie growl glitch and other issues prior to the game’s launch. Bugs aren’t unexpected while a game is undergoing a beta test, especially one with such a large attendance. Back 4 Blood beta testers should have hope, though – if the Back 4 Blood team’s response to the zombie scream debacle is any indication, the developer will likely be thorough in its efforts to produce a high-quality final product and address sensitive concerns like this one in a transparent way.

Back 4 Blood will be released on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on October 12, 2021.

Source: Back 4 Blood/Twitter

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Jane Shin Agler
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Jane Shin Agler is a freelance Game News Editor at Screen Rant based in Chicago. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2020 and received her master’s of science in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2021. Ask her about anything pertaining to Metroid, Fire Emblem or Red Dead Redemption and she’ll talk your ear off for hours. You can find her on Twitter @jshinagler or somewhere playing Pokémon FireRed for the 500th time.

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