How Sleeping Dogs Tried To Avoid Chinese Stereotypes

Set in Hong Kong, Sleeping Dogs didn’t just look to the city’s rich cinema tradition for inspiration. It also tried looking to the city itself.

But when you are mixing fact and fiction, you must be careful not to stereotype. Here’s Sleeping Dogs producer Dan Sochan to website CVG on attempting to overcome that challenge:

But to capture all that as a western developer without trying to play on stereotypes? It was a challenge. There were a lot of times we thought ‘We want to do this, because this is what we think of’ when we think of Hong Kong and Chinese culture. We had several people on our team who are from Hong Kong and we would check with them and they’d be like ‘no that’s a stereotype.’

I have to say in some cases we were pretty disappointed, because that would be amazing, some people may expect it. But we tend to always err on the side of realism in that case and we had several Hong Kong natives go through all of the signage all of the dialogue and make sure that things were correct, were accurate, were true to the city itself.

Check out the full CVG interview for more on the game. If you missed it, here’s the Kotaku review

https://lastchance.cc/sleeping-dogs-the-kotaku-review-5934272%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E

Sleeping Dogs interview: ‘Open world is by far the most challenging genre’ [CVG]

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