There is actually somewhat a metric. DPC mentioned on Steam page there will be over 12000 new static renders and 800 new animations in Season 2
That doesn't count, it's an old metric! It was mentioned in the Steam preview, and given the counts for Episodes 5-7, DPC's minimum 3000 static/300 animation prediction is already over the limit.
The difference in my opinion is their “whys” being internal to their character. This is a really difficult thing to explain.
Maya’s influence on the plot is limited because she’s not doing these things by choice. Maya’s personality doesn’t come into this. Her willingness to do anything and everything for tuition streamlines what little personality she has and stifles it’s development.
Sage/Bella/Jill and to a lesser extent Josy do things because of traits assigned to them and those traits are demonstrated and evolve. They’re obviously not real people but (and I fucking hate bringing up suspension of disbelief again but I will) you can sorta pretend they’re a little and extrapolate a personality.
Jill is kind, naïve, sexually inexperienced, nervous. She was bullied and had a personal issue with seeing that. Her choices often revolve around this. Jill is X and she does Y because of it. It isn’t perfect. Tybalt being something I’ve criticised as out of character… but she can have shit be out of character because she’s developed some kind of character.
Sage is the same. She’s got a rudimentary personality based around her pride. Her placing value in social standing. Her sexuality, her indignance. Her temper… more recently her genuine care for the girls in her sorority. Her “whys” link up and grow off each other and paint a picture.
Bella has this ice Queen thing that thawing. She haughty, sexually repressed….
ok look I’m not gonna list all the personality of everyone because it’s borderline cherry picking so I’ll leave it at this.
All the other girls make decisions based on crude “personalities” made by DPC writing. They are slowly growing, sometimes changing like people tend to do. Maya has a personality it just never gets fucking used or really expanded on. I wanna see how these established characters interact with stuff. How they will handle the story as it unfolds. It’s why I read/watch anything. To see how characters react to a situation. I can speculate about everyone else in this game. I can point out inconsistencies because there’s substance there to be inconsistent to.
Maya has so far, been predictable and that in my opinion means she’s not influencing the plot. She squanders most of her chances to show her personality and I struggle to care precisely how she’s going to just do as her father says yet again. She is exactly the character she was at the start. I don’t actually think I’m overstating that. Has she really changed? Has she grown? Is she even showing signs of changing? I like her, wanna see more of her but as it stands you could replace her decision making with a flowchart that reads.
(does this get me free tuition?)
Yes —> do it.
No —> default to what father wants.
And she’s been that way since Ep1. That’s why I say she’s struggling to become more than a conduit for a contrived plot point. Thats why I say she doesn’t influence the plot particularly. She’s stuck in a holding pattern over this tuition stuff and it’s taking away all her agency and room to grow.
She is different to the other girls because every choice they make in the story tells us a little more about them. All Maya’s decision making does is reinforce her solitary goal of getting tuition. That’s my criticism of her boiled down.
I do understand your point, but I think a lot of Maya's characterization hinges on whether you can accept that she IS driving most of those decisions. Maya is a cautious, prideful, yet introverted girl. She has low self-esteem (for obvious reasons), but she still has a stubborn streak in her. It's just that she'd prefer to bend with the wind rather than defy it outright. It doesn't make her a very dynamic character, and it is somewhat different than the facade she projects in Episode 1 before we get to know her, but I do feel it's a consistent characterization nonetheless. It certainly holds together better than Jill's blackmail subplot, which just seems wholly incompatible with her previous presentation.
For example, you mentioned why Maya and Josy drifted apart. We're given very few details (and exactly how far Patrick went in trying to disrupt communication matters a lot), but I think the general problem is that if it comes down to it, Maya would rather endure a few years pretending to tow the line than risk a confrontation she's likely to lose. She thinks that's the best route to be with Josy in the long term, and she assumes that Josy will reach the same conclusion. But Josy is a lot less risk-averse than Maya, so she sees Maya's reluctance as an indication that Maya doesn't care about Josy as much as she cares about Maya. Over time, that resentment, combined with difficulty in communicating at length once school was over, led to a negative feedback loop of sarcasm and despair.
I think each of the girls does care very strongly about the other, but they're young and assume that because those feelings are so strong, the other will automatically recognize how much they care. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work that way. Hopefully the two will begin to realize that and we'll see some character growth from each of them (though it will be more important for Maya here), though it may take the active support of the MC to accomplish this.
Similarly, Maya was willing to defy her father when he demanded she break up with Josy, but she still wanted to reconcile with him rather than cut him out of her life. He wound up taking advantage of her trust. That made things so much worse because not only did it effectively counter any effort to defy him going forward, it made her feel like a gullible fool. That made it even harder for her to share her problems with other people; not only did she have fresh reasons to doubt her ability to tell good advice from bad, but even asking for advice was humiliating for her. That's why she was so eager to get the MC to open up to her, and why she was so skittish about reciprocating. Did her behavior set up the Episode 3 cliffhanger? Absolutely. But, at least for me, it does ring true to her character.
Most of the other plot-bearing actions Maya takes can be similarly explained, IMHO. The only glaring exception is her "no strings attached" speech for the throuple path in Episode 5. Even there, I think there's a kernel of truth to the idea. It's just that "no strings" only makes any sense when the MC is obviously pursuing other girls and the three agree to a more nebulous relationship to start out with. But the speech happens even if the MC has only ever pursued Maya, at which point it just feels absurd. Can't win them all, I suppose.
Anyway, that's how I see Maya. I'm perfectly willing to accept that I'm filling in a lot of gaps in my interpretation of her character and I don't blame you for being unsatisfied if you aren't willing to do the same. Ultimately, the game is going to have to flesh out Maya's nature as time goes on. I had hoped the game had given us a little reprieve from Maya drama for Season 2 given how much it drove Season 1, but alas the game seems to be built around the combination of Maya and Quinn's stories. Most of the other dramas are intertwined with that, and that leaves Maya and Quinn in the awkward position of not being able to respond much to player action, at least at this point.
(Yes, I know Quinn can show her much heralded tender side on her own path. But as I've said before, the requirements for her path are essentially agreeing with her every whim and validating her actions at every step. The ability to change how Quinn perceives the world, much less how she treats the world, is still a
long ways off at best.)
That's how I see it, at any rate.
The dates and ages in BaDIk are all screwed up. I don't trust any of it to be honest. Originally the dates corresponded with 2017? I recall Cathy DOB 1979 and I believe she was listed in her online profile as 38? That would be around 2017. I also think that early calendars might have shown this date as well, but I can't get in to check this right now. With real life moving faster than game life, DPC would have to keep adjusting time and none of it would make much sense. Personally, I just imagine BaDIK is "recent times" and leave it at that.
The early calendars were all for 2017. But I don't put a whole lot of stock in the art assets, since I assume DPC will use what's available as far as calendars go. The most official date we have is Derek's statement that Lord Earl Grey was in the Class of 2017. That suggests the game is probably set in the fall of 2017 or 2018. 2020 is probably the latest possible date given Derek's obvious youth.
I was looking at the Reviews section for BaDIK for the first time recently. Until I saw a still of Bella more than a year-and-a-half ago and a search for her brought me to F95, I had never played a porn game. In all this time, I have never posted a review of BaDIK. Seeing as though there are already hundreds out there, I figure if someone hadn't heard of BaDIK by now and looked to the reviews for guidance as to whether they should try it, I think it's a bit pointless for me to add my critique needle to that particular haystack. After all, finding something interesting in the ocean of 5-star reviews is pretty time-consuming.
Any other longtime contributors in this crew that haven't reviewed it?
The more interesting reviews to me are the one-stars, even though several of them boil down to "I don't like this type of game." This confuses me. If you don't like the genre, your review is worthless. It would be no different than if a critic reviews an Italian restaurant, but hates Italian cuisine. No useful information would come from it. If a potential diner also hates Italian food, they certainly don't need a critic to tell them not to go there.
But the one-stars can still be entertaining. One guy said the MC "looks like Sonic fucked Ben Affleck."
I've never written a review for an incomplete game; it just seems like an impossible task when so much of the review hinges on my own expectations. And it's a huge hassle having to update the review after each update. Still, given how nice it is to read reviews of games in progress when deciding whether or not to play them, it's probably a silly policy on my part.
