Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Hejligan]

What worries me about the announcement me are statements like this:

"As noted previously, these issues are a result of the improvements made to graphical and computational accuracy, which have resulted in smoother visuals and a clearer representation of what was intended by the original data."

What especially bugs me is the: "[...] a clearer representation of what was intended by the original data."

What exactly is that supposed to imply?

When you design anything, it is the finished product that matters. When those designers more than a decade ago designed the original models, it was the actual finished output that met the players' eyes that was the intention, not some obscure notion of "what the data intended": the data intends nothing, the designer does, the data is rather a tool to accomplish a vision.

A good example of this fallacy regards old pixel-art games. One might argue that modern high-resolution displays "more accurately display what the original data intended", but actually, those games were designed with the imperfections of CRT-displays to create a more fluid, less pixelated image, which is completely destroyed by modern displays, despite ostensibly being more "accurate".

Or do they mean to tell us that our experiences for the past decade or more with our characters is somehow wrong because of this secret gem of data they are sitting on? Even though they themselves have admitted that they will try to respect our actual experiences of our characters for the past decade and will therefore try to change them as little as possible. Have they changed tune?

The graphical update changed my character from having obviously quite round eyes to now having really rather oval eyes. Are they implying that this might just have been intended all along (despite everyone from the past decade, including me, experiencing that my character has roundish eyes), but we are all too blind to see what this secret holy nugget of data truly "intends"?

I do hold out hope that they might still fix things like this, since other parts of their post were more hopeful, but this talk of "what the data intends" really worries me. That is not how design works.