Humbling the Audience

When it comes to stories in video games, there's usually only two things that can happen: One, the audience loves your story and everything about is defended until the end of time or two, the audience hates your story because they believe it is not quality, poor, amateurish, and more often than not considered lazy. But I just have to ask if there's a way to prove the audience wrong? Is it possible to show them that what they though was considered poor to actually be well constructed? And even if you could, would they believe you in your attempt to prove that you were right all along? That's the question I've asked myself a lot recently when it comes to writing and storytelling. Is there a way to show your audience that you always cared about your product, despite what they think? When gamers think quality, they see high scores on Metacritic, beautiful graphics, and above all a lot of marketing to show support of a product. This always changes between games though, despite what they see and hear. If a game gets high scores, and they play it but hate it, they will obviously be cautious about the next product in that series, despite the claims of its' omnipotence. However, there really hasn't been a game or series to rewrite the book on itself for previous entries, and by that I mean stories that change the perception of previous entries. Most games today push the envelope for the cheap thrill, living game to game on their successes. They don't tend to go back and say 'Yes, X was important because of Y, and now that you know, this circumstance is infinitely better.' I don't know if it's because developers and writers want to because of the perception of a lack of quality, but the effort really hasn't been made in this area, and until it's explored, we will never know if history can be re-written for the better. For such a situation to take place however, you would need to write a story in a series with the plan that it'd be written as an arc and not as an individual tale. Given the industry's reliance on playing it safe due to the amount of money games take to make, it's understandable if something like this doesn't pop up right away. However, it would take someone of truly excellent craft to do such a thing, and and one who is even better at crafting an experience to make the audience believe it was the intention from the beginning.