Sion Lenton, the creative director of Operation Flashpoint: Red River, has said that games based on real life conflicts are inappropriate.
“I, personally, don’t want to focus on live conflict. I don’t think it’s appropriate and I don’t think it’s tasteful,” he said during an interview with Edge.
“One of the girls who works here, her nephew was killed by an improvised explosive device [IED] a couple of months ago. So when I hear that, I don’t want to be in a fucking meeting bigging up my IED tech.”
“We are deliberately setting out not to court that controversy, we don’t want to go there and it’s not a conversation we ever wanted to get into.” he said.
“At no point did we think that it would be cool to set the game in Helmand or Afghanistan, because there’s a war going on there and there are British soldiers dying.” he added.
“We’re still making a war game, and showing soldiers dying, but I guess [the fiction] is us playing safe. But I don’t have a problem with playing safe when it comes to this kind of thing.”
Operation Flashpoint: Red River is due for release next year for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.