It seems Ubisoft was joking when it introduced "South Park: The Fractured But Whole's" skin color-based difficulty slide, as reports are that they do not do much in terms of difficulty and gameplay.

An observation made by gaming website Kotaku has made it clear that it picking the darker shades of skin color in the game did not affect their gameplay. This was contrary to the initial plans of publisher and developer Ubisoft that darker skin colors will add more difficulty in the game. Apparently, playing a tan skin colored character gave the players the same amount of rewards as playing a darker skinned character.

Additionally, the game's non-player characters (NPCs) will only make a short comment or two about the player character should he choose a dark shade of skin color. These comments range from "South Park sure is getting urban," to other more subtle racial stereotyping typical of the "South Park" franchise.

Ubisoft perhaps did the move in order to provide better choices for the players, as the game's difficulty being limited based on the character's skin color is rather constricting to customization. This somehow makes the feature more of an easter egg than an actual gameplay mechanic, as it was left for players to discover how the skin color slider in the character creation affects difficulty, or in this case, how it does not.

A developer interview in the game back in September revealed their plans to integrate skin color to the game's difficulty, where darker skins equate to harder gameplay, as well as additional NPC interactions. Ubisoft later took it back and stated that it was just a joke. When asked for clarification on the matter, the developer studio kept mum about details.

Regardless of Ubisoft's intentions for the actual impact of the said feature in character customization, it seems that their decision for skin color to be separate from the difficulty was for the best, both in terms of gameplay and customization.