Well, this is your perspective.
But what if you are an Arab who wants to play as Fatimid caliph, who rules over Palestine. Why should you calll your al-Quds Jerusalem just because some stupid Franks, who may or may not conquer it sometime during the game, call the city that way?
Not everybody wants to play as Norman duke. Some people want to play as breton count or duke or Arab emir or sultan and they have the same right to have their possessions named adequately as have the Normans, Franks or English, don't you think?
Please, don't be too etnocentric
First of all, please don't call me et
hnocentric, because I'm not and in the context in which you use it I take it as a borderline claim of racism and I take offense to that. Secondly, I don't normally play as a Norman duke. I normally play somewhere in Italy or the Western Med. Third, I'm certainly not calling for others not to "have the same right" to their place names, quite the opposite in fact, only making it
optional, because frankly, I
do see your point, and I actually think it is very cool, as I mentioned. My issues are mainly twofold: consistency and gameplay. Ofaloaf's already made the point that if you're wanting the feeling of being a local lord with your language place names, then the logical idea would be for every place in the map to appear with the names of the language for the culture you are currently playing as, not for it all to be different from one region to the next. If you are a Frankish lord Crusading to Jerusalem, of course there are no road signs in Frankish, but the Frank would still be able to know from interpreters, merchants, locals, etc. that this city is Jerusalem. But in game
I couldn't figure that out. Granted, I wikied al Quds and I learned some things that were very valuable, but nevertheless
from a purely gameplay perspective it's a pain to try and figure out what the hell a Kiraly of Magyarorszag is so you know what you're dealing with. Regardless of what the Magyars call their king and their country, a Frank or German would still know who they are dealing with is the King of Hungary. For consistency's sake I also find it rather ridiculous that Matilda is a Herzogin and Firenze is a Vogtei. When William wins the Norman conquest all the Earls in England suddenly become Counts. If you're really wanting the "
real Frankish lord experience" then why aren't all the events, buildings, and buttons translated into Frankish as well? The Roi d'France doesn't go around talking about "taxes", "Bowyers", and "raising fleets". But if you're the "King of France" everything is consistent and makes sense. Furthermore, to be truly as "non-ethnocentric" as you claim to be, why don't you break out Arabic script and Cyrillic letters? because let's face it, even an non-English speaking Arab doesn't know what "Al-Quds" is, either, so I expect to see القُدس in the next version. (/sarcasm)
Now that I've said that, again please don't mistake my posts as being mad about localized names or "ethnocentric", and I'm not trying to be hateful, just making my point. Again, I think they are very cool, and I like looking around the map in its current state and learning things about other languages. But
when I'm actually playing a game, I'd rather have everything localized consistently for gameplay's sake, and the most logical way to do that, given that the game is in English and the overwhelming majority of players are English speakers (whether they're native speakers or not), is Anglicized names. I think this should have been done as an option from the start, and it would have been much easier, very easy in fact, to have done it that way, but as it hasn't been done that way, as I mentioned I'd be very happy to help with creating such an
optional Anglicized localisation file.