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First of all, we stand by the freedom of speech, so we think that the Wargamer authors are free to express their opinions, no matter how much we agree or disagree with them.
Secondly, I must say, that in my opinion, the game was presented in a rather negative light and the review was too onesided as well, but that is up to the Wargamer team. If that is that they honestly think - that is fine with us.
Thirdly, about the game plot. This is where I disagree. There are several episodes in the game where Halder is portrayed rather negatively:
1) For example, after the battle of Moscow, Hitler asks him to commit war crime, Halder refuses (very noble), but does nothing to prevent Hitler from ordering other people to do the very same thing. It seems like he is more of "in denial" of what is happening around him.
2) He did not try to rebel against Hitler/Goering until he heard from Canaris that Goering was planning to arrest and execute him. So, he finally decided to take action only under the threat to his own life. It may be subtle, so that not everyone notices, but I would not say it is a very heroic move.
3) He did petty vengence against Manstein for outbidding his plan of invasion of France before Hitler.
We did not want to paint Halder black or white, we wanted to show the character grey, which is much closer to reality. It is easy to say Halder is awful person, and it is much harder to try to understand his motivation and actions and try to portray him honestly and without prejudice. We are not a court, and historically Halder was never sentenced to any punishment for his actions. We believe that everything a person does is done for a reason. We tried to understand what was Halder's motivations. Same as with other characters. The author did not say a word about the Hitler and Goering that were portrayed very close to reality, as hipocritical and often irrational, absolutely ruthless personalities, but who still had their own ends and motivations.
I think that we did not show all of Halder's historical failings, but then this is not a scientific treatise on 2000 pages, we had limited time and limited budget. We showed some of the events, that we thought important, and we tried to show his character.
The myth of clean Whermacht does exists, nobody argues with that.
Halder was never sentenced to any punishment and was awarded US Meritorious Civilian Service Award on behalf of US president. Nobody argues with that.
"On 23 July 1944, after the failed 20 July assassination attempt on Hitler's life by German Army officers, the Gestapo arrested Halder. Although he was not involved in 20 July plot, intense interrogations of the conspirators revealed that Halder had been involved in earlier conspiracies against Hitler. Halder was imprisoned at both the Flossenbürg and Dachau concentration camps." Nobody argues with that.
It was a very controversial and complicated person. It who are we to judge him?
We tried to the best of our ability to show all personalities true to thier character and give the viewer an idea of what person that was. Of course, more extensive research then playing our game only is required to fully comprehend all the historical events, but we think our games are a good head start. We try to show the events from every side's perspective, and we will continue to do that in our future projects.
We present the events as close to reality as possible, so when Hitler says his Reichstag speech - we took the exctaracts of his historical speech. But that does not mean we say that what he said was "true" or "good", or "right". Even more so, right before his speech we show him issuing order to invade Poland, so it is obvious to everyone that his words "Today, at 5.45 am, the Polish regular soldier have fired on our territory. We are returning fire..." are lies. Similarly, Goering is obviosly hipocrytical in probably all of his scenes. Is someone takes his words at face value, I can offer my condolances only.
I am sure the players who follow our projects for some time have noticed that there is good deal of irony in our dialogues. If someone fails to notice it..., well, I cannot stay there all day holding an "IRONY" sign.
Lastly, the thing that alarmed me the most about the review and the ensued discussion was the idea that PC2 (or any other game) that does not delve into the historical/political context was a "good game", since it does omit all the hard questions, and that our games are "bad games", becouse they delve into politics and can be malicious in the context of modern world. THAT IS THE MOST WRONG STATEMENT THAT I EVER SEEN. It is wrong and "up-side-down" on all levels, that I just cannot ignore it. Let me explain my indignation:
When the WW2 ended, the main motto of the time was "Never again". So, the humatiny was united around the idea that these horrible events should never repeat. In order to avoid any mistakes in life, one has to be at least aware of them. Hence the famous quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." by George Santayana. So, when the player playes the game, and "just moves Whermacht or USSR tanks around" without any backstory, he likes the game and thinks it is a good thing. What bad there could be about it? So, in my opinion, it is vice versa, historical wargames without the historical/political context, could potentially be much more harmful, because they create the false lull of safety. Now, I am not saying they should be banned or anything, it is just a philosophical debate. I say that historical wargames that show the historical events as they were, are much more importnant in fulfiling that "Never again" motto, as they remind everyone what events occured. We often get critizied for telling about history and touching sensitive matters. But then, should we all forget these events? Should we ban all WW2 films? Should we ban history at schools/universities? Should we burn all the books and memoirs on WW2 history? Please, tell me, because I do not understand this hipocritical position. This is the very thing that can lead to the repetition of these events, only at even more massive scale. I just do not get this position. Can someone explain that to me?
Sorry for being that emotional, I think I just got carried away a bit, but it is just very frustraiting to be judged all the time for trying to show our history.
Closing notes. At some points our games start to dive into the alternate-history realm, so I am not talking about that. The alternate history parts are more of an exploration of what "could have happened" they have more to do with entertainment then with history, as we all know, as soon as one starts "What would have happened, if..." sentence, that is no longer history, that is only a work of fiction. Still, we try to follow logic and characters, so that is what was likely to happen in our opinion. Then again, you can understand and view things differently. Some people in Russia thought that the German parade on the Red square was a Nazi propaganda, but in our opinion is was a show of what horrible events were avoided by the heroic Russian fighters defending their homeland. Moreover, taking Moscow did little good to both Hitler and Goering, and to anybody else for that matter. So, it is a question of context, perspective and understanding of the historical events.
Thank you for sharing this article with us and asking for our views. I do not think we should enter the discussion of every article on the internet, but we are always ready to react to any of the players feedback on our community hubs, and are happy to share our thoughts with you and start a potentially very promising discussion about our games' plot. We encourage everyone to join in and share their thoughts on the subject as well.
https://bigbossbattle.com/panzer-strategy-3d-wwii-warfare-done-right/
PLUS, their "Any game where you play as the Germans during World War 2 can already be a potentially controversial affair..." is bull****. You've been able to play as the German side in WWII games since there have been WWII games. I know: I've been around a VERY long time (from [literally] hard-drive-less Amigas onward).
Turn it on, pop in the OS floppy disk.
Eject it.
Once ready, pop in the game floppy disk. Play a while...
Eject it.
When ready, pop in the savegame floppy disk. Save the game.
Eject it.
Put the game floppy disk back in to play more.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Sorry for the double post. Felt like being a little edumacational. hahahaha
There is a scene in PG2 where you are asked to make a decision whether or not to hand over Polish civilians to the German police. To come up with an excuse that you 'lost' the civilians allowing them to escape costs you 75% of your prestige. The dialogue indicates 'distaste' by the Wehrmacht for the German Police and their hunting of Polish civilians for the purposes that history now shows.
Clearly this is intended to suggest that the Wehrmacht were decent guys and the NAZI's were the bad guys. If this isn't a more blatant form of playing into myths about the Wehrmacht being an apolitical, 'clean' branch of the Nazi government I don;t know what is. Any mention if this scene in the article or the PG2 review? Nope.
I do think they make a fair point about the portrayal of Halder and the games tacit support of the clean wehrmacht myth. In my opinion, if the game had never brought up the war crimes committed then it would be a sort of moot point; we all implicitly agree that these things happened and they were terrible, but the game is just a war game and so thats a conversation for another time. This is the approach of games like hearts of iron, where its just never brought up. But the game DOES talk about the various war crimes, quite a lot actually. There's several cutscenes with rommel about it, the lines about the treatment of russian prisoners after kursk, and the crete mission has the bonus objective with disarming civilians. While less gruesome that the holocaust, there are also the numerous bonus objectives about plundering museums and such. I get that the game wants to have a sympathetic group of protagonists (halder, rommel, manstein, guderian, donitz, cannaris), but many of these leaders, Halder included, were perpetrators of war crimes. But if you were unfamiliar with the history and played this game, you'd probably come away thinking they were pretty OK people, doing their best to disobey criminal orders and lawfully conducting a war, and hitler and goering were the ones ordering all the crimes. When I started playing the game I had never heard of halder, and I honestly thought he was a made up character until I looked him up, because it seemed quite plausible to me that the game would invent a general for you to play as so that they could justifiably make him more sympathetic and not a war criminal. His role as one of the primary creators of the clean wehrmacht myth also complicates things. Regarding his receipt of some decorations by the US, I would hardly hold that as exculpatory evidence for his conduct, since US rehabilitation of the wehrmacht, and by extension the new bundeswehr, is part of the point of the myth.
I don't think this is a problem unique to SM blitz, like steevo says PG2 and tons of other games do this as well. Arguably, ignoring the war crimes entirely is also problematic, because it divorces the war crimes and racist ideology from the war itself and fascism as a political system, when really they are fundamentally linked. Just look at the people who like to literally roleplay as the SS in company of heroes, for example.
Finally, I found the review annoyingly self rightious with all the discussion about the clean wehrmacht myth, with very little about the game itself. Cutscenes are just cutscenes and honestly I bet most players skip em. This is one of the more well thought out mid level complexity hex based war games out there, so giving its gameplay barely any treatment is poor journalism I think. I don't think problematic portrayal of the wehrmacht is an issue that should be ignored, but its not like they're gonna save the world from neo-nazism by scrutinizing a niche strategy game. I get the impression that the author would rather be writing about something else.
They're 100% right about the way bonus objectives are sprung on you half way through the missions though, thats complete BS and I hope it changes for spectre of communism. Tell us all the objectives in advance or with ample forewarning so that we can actually plan around them
We have contacted the wargamer.com staff about this article, and asked them to add link to our statement, so that there is no one-sided presentation of the issue.
Here is our final statement:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1200330/announcements/detail/2901963148048277119
They agreed to add the link to it in the article.
I think our statement is an exhaustivbe summary of our view on this matter.
I don't know what the hell their writer was thinking, but it wasn't about the mechanics and gameplay... you know, like a GAME REVIEW. Geez.
If you (or anyone else) want to make a review and require a key or press kit you can always get in touch with us via email. Let us know at contact@starnigames.com.
Very cool. I'll probably take you up on that one!
I don't get it. Never have. The ONLY point I've ever seen that's even close to worthwhile: In Germany, they don't like WWII games with Swastikas. I kind of understand, but they ARE historical games after all.
Same thing's happening right now in the US: Everybody's butt-hurt over Confederate flags, statues, etc. It's history. Get ******g over it already.
Just leave that sort of crap out of your games
Stick to making good wargames instead of whitewashing history
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Losses-Investigation-Prisoners-Americans/dp/0889226652/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=other+losses&qid=1621697982&sr=8-1
Here's a history book how the allies murdered 1 million German POWs after ww2. Mass-rape and mass murder of German civilians happend also often in occupied German territories.
A lot of Wehrmacht crimes are made-up propaganda, often commited by the soviets themselves btw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Here's another genocide commited by soviets.
Eh the statement waffles badly.
You may have done better just keeping it at 2-3 points;
"Briefly, whilst we respect Wargamer's opinion on the matter, we would like to point out that we have no intention of propagating the Clean Wehrmacht myth, nor do we support Nazism. The game does take place from the viewpoint of the Nazi/Wehrmacht, and so will follow the ebb and flow of the political situation at the time, as it was historically, and perhaps at times exaggerated for effect, but these are not the views of the creators, and to suggest so is patently offensive."
Something like that etc, rather than the 7 points you went with, especially as by the 5-6th points it starts coming across too individualistic rather than a PR response (and in this case, you definitely want the PR response IMO).