You’re over-thinking this. I’m 45, literally have a degree in ancient history and have traveled to Europe several times. Zantai is actually from Europe and went to church in an old medieval fortress-cathedral. I grew in small-town New England, the quintessential colonial frontier, surrounded by historic wooden churches.
The #1 reason there’s no religion yet is that by the time I started thinking about how to add it in, we had a lot of older systems in the game that needed to be refactored and or fixed. It’s what we call “development debt” where you’ve build a lot of stuff that is sort-of-working but in order to actually get into a release-ready state, it requires a lot of additional work. About a year ago we switched from adding features to just trying to get all our existing features and content into release-ready condition because I was growing increasingly concerned that we’d maybe worked on the game too long without having any idea of how well it might sell. I thought we’d get through everything and be able to hit up some more features but just fixing and polishing to get the game to the state its in now took almost a year.
Now that we’re in EA and the game is doing well, justifying the time we’ve invested in it, we are able to look at making some more feature and content additions. Depending on how in depth we wanted to go with religion and how many options we wanted to give people, we could make it a DLC or keep things simpler and add it in a free update.
When we do add religion, I don’t know if we’ll include a classic looking church or not. I’m not sure if I want to add them, not because I’m woke and afraid of offending people (I mean, we’re clearly going to offend someone whatever we do), it is that I am just personally not that interested in churches and the game was never meant to be a real-world history simulator. Despite coming from a more Catholic family and being fairly conservative themselves, my parents were never very religious and I grew up with no personal attachment to churches. I’m sorry if that offends you but that’s where I’m coming from. I find many older European religious just as, if not more interesting and would probably rather just do my own thing here that is a blend of historical sources. The goal of this game was to create a detailed and authentic feeling pioneer-survival experience but not to accurately simulate real-world history. If you’re after more historical accuracy, there’s already games that strive for that.
Its kind of ironic that you think we’re leaving out churches because we’re woke and afraid of offending people and yet here you are, being all offended, like the cancel-culture mob you think we’re worried about.
What I can tell you is, if you decide to make your own game and put churches or whatever else you want in it, I guarantee I won’t show up on your forums being all publicly offended about it, because I think you have a right to design your game however you see fit.
You’re welcome to express your desire to see churches in the game but lets not get all offended, make assumptions about people’s motives and make this a personal attack.