On a more on-topic note, two of my least favorite alt-hist settings (both of which happen to be incredibly popular Hearts of Iron IV mods) have got to be Kaiserreich and The New Order: Last Days of Europe. Putting aside my own personal feelings and experiences because that would bring up off-site drama which I don't want to do, both settings come across as lackluster, to be frank.
Kaiserreich, without even talking about the ludicrous Second American Civil War, has far too many parallelisms and wasted potential for me to actually enjoy it anymore, and that's not even talking about what comes across as an increasing bias towards the left-leaning aspects of the setting. Now, that may change as the team develops the mod further, but the pessimist in me isn't that hopeful. To give an example of one particular parallelism that irks me to no end, namely the Italian Republic's Legionary path. Whereas when it was originally released, it had
some modicum of uniqueness (Gabriele D'Annunzio being the initial leader before dying and passing the reins to Italo Balbo) compared to the rest of Italy, now it's just Balbo's Not!Fascist Italy without any attempt at creating something of real substance. The ruling party of that path is called the Italian Nationalist Association, but other than the name, the actual regime is essentially a carbon copy of the National Fascist Party from OTL, down to the creation of similarly named organizations and titles. They don't acknowledge the differences between the OTL ANI and the NFP, such as the undercurrent of left-leaning "proletarian" nationalism espoused by the founder of the ANI, Enrico Corradini or the fact that the ANI was far more syncretic than the NFP in the end. It's nothing more than alt!Fascist Italy, and that's just plain boring.
As for wasted potential, there's a couple of things, but here are the most glaring ones that I can think of: Mittelafrika not imploding in the 20s, Warlord China Part 2: Foreign Boogaloo, and the Indochinese/Vietnam War in the 30s. Then there's the increasing sense that it's no longer just your standard alternate history mod/scenario, but a full-fledged business or brand. There's a Patreon account, a collective of creatives working on things, merchandising, a Sealion Press book, and even plans for short films. Which isn't to say that any of those things are bad or deserving of condemnation, because independent writers/artists/creatives do shit like that all the time, but it leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth when a group is making nearly a thousand dollars a month off of donations from their fans (with 25% of the proceeds going to the Kaiserreich modding team, whatever that means) while individuals who want do the same thing have to just barely manage to scrape by on a daily basis in addition to whatever they do in real life to support themselves. Maybe I'm just a pessimistic asshole, but it all just rubs me the wrong way and it feels like Kaiserreich's gone from an interesting scenario done out of genuine passion for the genre to a soulless cashgrab. I don't know, I used to be really into Kaiserreich, but now it just baffles me.
Now, as for The New Order, it's just boring and uninspired. It's an Axis victory scenario that handwaves how it happens in order to explore what the aftermath of that world would be, and then it throws all of that potential away for something that's frankly generic. The Nazis and Imperial Japan win and everything goes to shit. That's it. Sure, things start to collapse by the time the mod starts, but everything else is just so...boring. Axis victory scenarios can range from interesting and plausible to generically dystopian. I'd call it a Dystopia Wank, but it's more accurately a
Dystopia Bukkake. Sure, there are subversions and a variety of different outcomes that can happen, and it's all undoubtedly well-written. But Christ, what's the point of spending all that time on well-written stuff when you're going over the same old ground that's been done since PKD wrote
The Man in the High Castle, except it's even more depressingly dystopian than previous works? It doesn't come across as groundbreaking, just tiresome and dystopian for the sake of being dystopian, yet people treat it like this revolutionary piece of fiction. I don't get it, and I've actually played the mod on several occasions (mostly in Russia and Africa) only to get bored by how proud it is of itself for being extremely dystopian in nature.
Of course, this isn't to say that people shouldn't play these mods or enjoy these scenarios, because they're absolutely entitled to enjoy what they want. But it's just very disappointing to see people continuously laud scenarios that strike me as incredibly bland when compared to works here and on The Other Place (am I doing it right?), such as the various works by EdT, Napoleon53's
What Madness is This?, Major Crimson's
Fear Nothing but God (a timeline where England transforms into a democratic republican Commonwealth), The Red's
Our Struggle, and Jonathan Edelstein's
Malê Rising. I don't know, maybe this was just a long pointless ramble that people will ignore, but it's something that I've ruminated on for some time now.
