I can tell you have a different view on opinions than I do. I don't think any opinion can be invalidated like that. I hate calling it a fallacy but the "sunk cost fallacy" is a thing and I'd like for people to avoid it as much as possible.
I give vastly more credit to opinions when they're knowledgable. If A almost never goes out to eat but loves the Olive Garden and B has eaten all over the world at the most interesting places at all levels of price and sophistication (and is also an excellent home chef) and they both give me an opinion about a restaurant, I'm going to massively preference one opinion over the other. I think doing otherwise is
insane. So if that's different from your view, then yes, I guess we do.
I hope you realize how pedantic this is.
I'm confused by your response. There is a rather bloated corpus of bad-faith argument in this thread that the game, as it currently exists, has betrayed its intent. There's a truly
nutty amount of assignment of blame and swaggering theorizing about who's at fault (mostly not from you, though occasionally from you). And yet, not one but two members of the development team — I think that makes two-thirds, but I'm open to correction — have stated that there's not only a plan, but that the belief that this was a "lighthearted incestuous romp" or whatever was wrong, was
always wrong, and will remain wrong.
So...it's wrong. I don't blame anyone for thinking otherwise. I did too, and there's evidence of it way back in this thread. The divergence comes here: when it suddenly wasn't, I accepted that I was wrong and proceeded to take the story as it now exists. I'm not criticizing anyone for not liking the shift. I'm ambivalent about it until I'm convinced that it will pay off in a satisfactory way. I'm criticizing the insistence that the story has betrayed some objective ideal (and, in many cases, the puerile, foot-stomping, "I refuse to see the thing hovering in front of my face" belief that this cannot ever have been the plan). Objective ideals have been, and can
only have been, imposed on the game by players. All of us, individually, with our own interpretations. There are only two or three people whose ideals actually inhabit the game, and we only have one statement of intent from them. That's Viit's intro on the Patreon page. That's it. That's
all. (Well, OK, we have Ptolemy on Discord as well, and the occasional burst of frustration from
gamersglory, though I can't believe he willingly subjects himself to the nonsense and defamation in this thread.) Everything else is the fantastical imagination of consumers, none of whom understand the authorial intent. Including me, by the way.
Is your opinion on that somehow invalidated by the fact that there's a "more complete" version out there?.
I reject the premise that they're "more complete." I'm a very good editor and that's part of how I make my living, but it's not the same art as creation, and even though I do it every day I would argue it's a
lesser art than creation because it's inescapably parasitic. Unless it's fixing a technical error,
post hoc tinkering of this nature degrades the art.
That's why it's bad; it's not because there's a CG Jabba for Han to step on. Give me unlimited resources and I can "fix" everything until all creation satisfies 100% of my whims, but that would be a tragically dull artistic world in which I'd never want to live. I can create my own art, and I do, but once I've created it I get very little pleasure out of consuming it.
I want to be surprised, startled, taken out of my comfort zone, moved in ways I don't expect, shown things I never expected to see. I need other people's flawed, incomplete, but thoroughly authentic visions to experience that.
