Call of Duty: Vanguard players have come across several references to the Muslim holy text in the game’s Zombies mode. Several players found pages of the book scattered across the floor in one of the game mode’s maps. While this reference might seem inoffensive to some, it is pretty disrespectful for Muslims to find pages of their holy book stained with blood and scattered across the floor. As such, players made their concerns known to Activision and they promptly responded.
Below, you can see screenshots and video captured by the first person to catch the Quran references:
مقطع فديو عشان محد يقول فبركة #No_Call_of_Duty pic.twitter.com/0GSRXDwB3Q
— ᴮᴷᵀᴼᴼᴿ (@BKTO0R) November 10, 2021
Needless to say, outrage surrounding the inclusion of the holy text occurred. The user who found this urged the Call of Duty team to remove the content from the game. Soon after, many users started tagging the Call of Duty Twitter page to ask to remove the text’s references.
Soon enough, a hotfix was issued for Call of Duty: Vanguard, which removed the Quran references from the Zombies mode. This hotfix was followed with a statement from Activision made in Call of Duty Middle East’s Twitter account, which translated shows the following:
Activision has now addressed some insensitive content referring to the Quran that was found in-game in Vanguard zombies. pic.twitter.com/qCvYlQFk5c
— MW2 OG (@TheMW2Ghost) November 11, 2021
As The Gamer’s article pointed out, there are almost two billion Muslims in the world – nearly a quarter of the world’s population. The majority of them live outside the Middle East. Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria have the five largest Muslim populations globally.
As such, using a Middle East-specific account to apologize is profoundly ignorant. Since it only responds to a small sector of the population that holds the Muslim creed. Then again, it’s the same company that thinks people can look away from years of abusive practices just because the CEO accepted a lower salary.
Mind you; this isn’t the first time a religious text is found in Call of Duty’s maps. In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the Favela map has scriptures from the book etched into the frame of a painting in a bathroom. This, of course, was found as an inappropriate place to find the text. The map was subsequently removed altogether following backlash.
Call of Duty: Vanguard is currently available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
