Unreal Tournament 3 recently appeared on the site of the USK, the German games ratings board with a 16+ rating. Because of the crazy laws concerning game violence in Germany, many games must be cut or censored before they're able to obtain a USK rating and avoid being banned outright in Germany.
We contacted Midway Germany to find out what exactly had been cut from the German version of UT3 (which, incidentally, goes on sale a week before the rest of the world). Here's what they said:
We had to make some minor changes to the game to get an age rating at all. [...] The biggest change is that you can't shoot already dead people (and they won't explode into thousand parts) and that ragdoll is disabled for dead people as well.
We confirmed with Epic programmer and UT3 lead designer Steve Polge that these changes don't affect network compatibility between the German version and non-censored versions of the game.
The versions are fully network compatible. Ragdolls still exist on the German censored version, but you cannot affect them after a player has been killed.
