It has been a contemptuous few weeks for Bohemia Interactive, as DayZ was effectively banned in Australia. This brought a whole lot of attention, and is now subsequently back to normal. We hadn’t reported on the matter for some time, until last week in fact; but it seems in that time we’ve had several more interesting cases come to light. At first, I called DayZ the first casualty of the year when it came to the ACB (Australian Classification Board), but it turns out I was wrong.

According to Niche Gamer, and their source @RefusedC on Twitter, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is the first. Or shall I say, was the first as the classifications board now states the game to be R18+. Australian authorities may have seen the news on the rise of Kingdom Come‘s classification refusal and switched it, however, we don’t know for certain as there is no record of it being refused classification or any states to the matter either.

So back to DayZ, why was it banned? We don’t know. The small chart of the board’s site states that the game features: moderate language, strong violence, and strong themes. Previously we thought it was for the case of drug use in the game, particularly drugs for healing. However, drug use, sex, and nudity don’t make a blip on the ACB’s radar.

The most high profile case against drug use in Australia was Fallout 3, which prompted developer, Bethesda, to switch the term “morphine.” a simple drug used across the planet for pain relief, to the less offensive, “Med-X” that we see in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 respectively. We don’t know what made the ACB change their minds on the classification, though we could assume the gamers and press putting pressure on them may have helped.

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