Electronic Arts managed to get negative attention once again – we wouldn’t be surprised if this is what Andrew Wilson’s company wanted to achieve to see how much Battlefield V has improved since its launch in the Fall.

While the 75th anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy is being celebrated, DICE and Electronic Arts decided to reveal the next Elite character in Battlefield V, which also has a World War II setting. The timing is a good marketing move, and we can’t say a bad thing about it, but the name of the character has some issues. Wilhelm Franke is not the best choice for the new Elite in BFV.

Franke Wilhelm does what you would typically expect from a Nazi character in a video game, aside from not wearing a swastika whatsoever. That’s all fine and dandy, but VICE reports that Wilhelm Franke in real life was an anti-fascist resistant fighter in the Third Reich during World War II, according to the Google translated Wikipedia article. He was arrested at least twice before dying with his family in the Dresden firebombings. (Research? What’s that? That’s probably what the company was thinking…)

„We’ve become aware that one of the names of our Elites, Wilhelm Franke, shares the name of a real-life resistance member in Germany during the Second World War. We want to apologize as we certainly didn’t mean any disrespect to him. We are in the process now of changing the name of our Elite in the game. In Battlefield 5, we’re not making any political statements in relation to the real-life events of WW2 and there are no swastikas in the game,” Electronic Arts said in a statement. And here’s the issue: the publisher firmly stands by its viewpoint, which isn’t a logical move – if they’d have left the last sentence out of its statement, the story might have had a happy ending.

At least Electronic Arts makes DICE rename the character – if Wilhelm Franke was a resistance fighter in the game and not a Nazi, it’d have been a kind gesture by the publisher. But no.

Source: PCGamer