Call of Duty: Mobile has grown into one of the most popular mobile games with a growing user base. And with the popularity, comes its fair share of issues and controversies. COD Mobile developers have been slammed with one such issue where angry Muslim players of the game have take it to social media to voice their opinion about an upcoming map. Eagle-eyed beta testers noticed a particularly sensitive nature that is quite offensive to individuals belonging to the Muslim faith.
As per our reports and the community’s findings, Call of Duty: Mobile’s latest test server has a map called Oasis in which references to Islamic scripture can be found riddled throughout the walls of the map. The point of this test server is for players to provide early feedback and report back any bugs or problems to the developers before that game update is made available to everyone. Let’s take a quick look at the implications of having religious texts like these in the game alongside previous instances of where this has happened before in the gaming community.
Islamic Phrase in COD Mobile Test Server
The new Oasis map from the latest Season 2 test server contains religious writings. You can take a look at this tweet from Call of Duty: Mobile Leaks & News.
The text itself loosely translates to wordings from the Holy Quran, the sacred text for Muslims. It is a commonly used phrase and holds a lot of values for those who follow Islam. It translates to the following:
‘There Is No God But Allah And Muhammad Is The Messenger Of Allah’
Taking a look at the translation, it can clearly be seen that a text that has such a large religious significance for billions of Muslims around the world should not be present in the game whatsoever. Consequently, public backlash has been quite significant with a lot of players speaking out about this issue on Twitter and other platforms:
Previous Instances
Surprisingly, this is not the first time that Activision has been into hot water for offending a religious segment. Back in 2012, Arabic writing was found in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s map Havana. What was particularly infuriating for Muslims was the fact that Quranic scripture was found written on a photo frame present inside the bathroom.
Angry gamers took to Twitter and YouTube to share their objections and threatened to boycott the company. Activision then pulled the map releasing the following statement:
“We apologize to anyone who found this image offensive. Please be assured we were unaware of this issue and that there was no intent to offend.”
A Request To The Developers
For decades, games in general have been a platform where everyone leave their political and religious differences aside. As such, you won’t be finding any sort of offensive content especially on mainstream titles. While we do know that the developers would not want to offend their community purposefully, the text itself has led to a lot of players threatening to boycott the game if immediate action is not taken.
This could possibly be the work of a developer or designer who did not have prior knowledge to what this Arabic text means. However, we hope the developers will look into the issue and remove all instances of any sort of religious scripture being quoted in the game, no matter what the context may be.
Since this has already been identified and noted to the developers in an early stage, it should be immediately removed and edited out of this upcoming map.
UPDATE (Feb. 9, 2021): Activision has removed the above mentioned ‘Oasis’ map from Call of Duty: Mobile Season 2 Test Server. It is most likely the developers are re-working the design elements of the map or have completely removed it from coming out next month. [via Murdablast]
