Release - 4.90 Part 2

[Kazinsal]

The point I'd comment on is this though:

As much as I love Konigsberg as a name (and I really , really do), it's bound to offend both Polish and Russian people. The first because they've been fighting for probably more than 1000 years to preserve their national heritage in the face of crippling multiple front wars against Sweden, Russia and Germany that, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, had completely enslaved and subjugated their people and attempted to erase their heritage from existence. See - The Deluge, The Third Partition of Poland, The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and The Warsaw Pact - and the second because Konigsberg is Kaliningrad now, and the Russians suffered 60 million dead to take it off the Germans and then didn't even bother giving it back to Poland because they wanted a warmer Baltic port.

Now I don't have a personal stake in that particular fight since I am absolutely not Polish, but I can certainly understand the Polish people who would be offended by referring to Danzig, Konigsberg or anything about East Prussia in a German context at all really. Every major power around them for the last 500 years has tried their absolute best to completely demolish and erase Poland.

I 100% understand this is a game and this choice doesn't offend me in the slightest. In fact I'm a big fan of alternative history and I always play Axis powers when I play Hearts of Iron III or IV or actually any WW2 game. I dont bemoan your choice, actually I love it, but I hope you can also understand how Polish history has made a lot of Poles protective of every part of their national identity, and what reaction that can cause when make choices like this.

I guess it would be like calling Romanian cities and places in the Balkans by their Turkic names.

But lets not be totally negative. I appreciate that you're trying to rationalise a whole lot of stuff that doesn't make sense. When it comes to the story, I think there needs to be a lot more appreciation that what you started with wasn't great and you need to be commended for trying to rescue it, rather than rewrite it. Whether that's the right choice or not, I dont know, but you deserve to be applauded for trying.

Yikes.

We were not aware of the connotations behind using Konigsberg as a system name and naming the contents of the system after the real-world locations in the region. We clearly didn't do our homework on this one and we deeply apologize. The dev leads have convened to hash out new names for the system and its locations and I will personally be making sure they're safe for use.

Lessons were learned today.

---

Retired, permanently.