My game project is a 2D top down RPG with dating simulator & visual novel elements in it, and I have a few parts of dialogue in my game that have bad words and used often by a character.
However, I'm afraid those bad words will affect the age rating up to 17+, so I decided to censor bad words optionally. This means player can enable bad words after confirming legal disclaimers.
Will this feature results more friendly age rating? I'm targeting for 15+ age rating.
Answer
Different rating agencies have different criteria by which they rate games. But usually they rate the games by everything that's available in them (and sometimes even things which can only be enabled by mods). So if you have a censorship function which the player can turn off, many rating agencies will rate the game under the assumption that the player will turn it off.
So adding an optional censorship feature might have value for some of your players who don't like such content, but it will likely not have value for most rating boards.
Optionally, you could publish two editions of your game, a "dirty" one and a "clean" one. This is actually quite common in the visual novel genre. Kanon and Air exist in two versions, one adults-only version with explicit sex scenes and one without. But that means that you need to obtain separate ratings for both, submit both to different platforms, etc, etc. To avoid another "hot coffee" situation, you should actually delete all objectionable content from the clean version and not just dummy it out. That means you should actually change any objectionable strings in the clean version at compile-time and not just run a filter over them at runtime.
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