Because the finished one is in now way what the final game was supposed to be. I suppose in some rare cases, the only issue with a prototype is, say, none of the animations are correctly aligned--and so some menial correction can give you what the prototype was supposed to be.
However, the authors behind the project are injecting new, outside code into the game, which starts to cross the borderline. What the project seems to be doing is trying to finish it according to expectations of the restoration team, and that is not what the expectations of the original dev team are (as I find it incredibly unlikely that the restoration team has been in contact with the original devs, nor came into possession of a blueprint of the game's scenario and events).
This project, and I can be wrong, seems more like they're taking an existing, unfinished game and putting in guessed-elements, and fixing present elements where available, in order to create not Resident Evil 1.5, but to create a distinct experience based off of the 1.5 files.
While I don't have access to this original prototype, and so I can't honestly know how much injection of new elements is present as opposed to simply reenabling/fixing old elements, I highly doubt the mod thus far is meant to restore present content alone. Their goal seems to be to create the missing 1.5 game. This isn't reenabling scrapped scenarios, like in KotoR 2, which had most of the missing stuff still in-game that only needed reenabling. This is more like a full creation of new content to pass as old content. Which, naturally, isn't the same as the old content no matter how hard one tries.
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It sounds to me like a division between accurate emulation and just being able to play games: this isn't a "completed" version in any natural sense. Though it walks the line, the project seems more akin to some group simply guessing at what the final 1.5 experience would have been. However, development info seemed to have suggest that the vanilla 1.5 project was fairly complete before it was scrapped, including a final boss battle, so it could perhaps be more of a route of just reenabling and polishing some unfinished elements that are comparably smaller than an entire scene or event in-game.
Most of all, having the original, unmodified prototype means two things, amongst many:
1) We can compare the "complete" version to find out what, exactly, survives in their finished version, and see whether the restoration team took liberties with their work. One reason this is important is because less-inclined fanbases may take the artificial restoration project as an assumed 100% representation of what the original dev team intended 1.5 to be (and again, these are two distinct experiences and thus would be a false assumption.
2) We would have an actual copy, for all intents and purposes, of as an unmodified distribution of the unfinished game as possible. We don't want another Lufia II experience where someone fucks with the original source code and has to port FINAL GAME CODE into the game just to get it running again. It not only completely invalidates the original source prototype: it completely fucks the chances of ever having a picture into the original development cycle as clearly as we could have. This speaks most strongly to the archival circles who wish to preserve the history of game development, and to avoid baseless speculation and insertion of personal beliefs and biases into said-history. |
