DPC clearly thinks the end is in sight; he's ticking down a list of what's left to complete, he's hoping to pose the final animations, and as you say he's organizing the Patreon credits. So I think we really are in the final stages of development, it's just a question of how long that will take, which seems likely to come down to the animation queue.
Currently we seem to be heading for an early-ish December release. We might just be able to hit the end of November if rendering to continues to accelerate and DPC edits tightly, but I don't think that's realistically going to happen. I also don't think late December is likely since I doubt DPC wants to handle a release in the middle of the holidays. So my guess is he'll either push to get it out in the first half of December or release it just after the new year. But those are just guesses.
Did you really miss
my wall of text explaining the letdown?
To summarize, it mostly comes down to two things: I thought the crossroads was a mess and I don't like where the game seems to be going in Season 3.
On the crossroads, DPC wanted a big decision moment, but he did a lousy job pacing the various paths to get to that point. DPC ducked out of showing the MC formalize things with Maya and Josy because he wanted that moronic 'twist' with the Burkes. So the throuple has effectively been stalled for the whole of Season 2. Sage's path was twisted into a pretzel because DPC had advanced the fuck buddies route too quickly (hence the infamous 'rebound guy' concern coming out of nowhere to cool it off) and hadn't developed the friendship route enough (hence the MC going from zero to 3-out-of-5 in a single party). [Oh, and Sage had to timeshare her only sex scene in Episode 8 with Quinn, which is unconscionable!
] Bella's path would be fine... except that the MC flat out refuses to ask WTF happened to her husband, as though that's a minor concern. Jill's path is the only one that works from a pacing point of view - and that still required slogging through Tybalt's blackmail bullshit so Jill winds up looking like an imbecile.
All of those problems with the crossroad were then magnified by the way the episode ended. First, we get that miserable one-size-fits-all 'twist' where the MC craps his pants because Sage is a Burke. An MC who fucked his new girlfriend's mom and slugged her brother has the same reaction as an MC who realized his friend's mom is his teacher.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
I really cannot overemphasize how colossal a mistake that was. You don't force the player to make a (supposedly) huge, long-lasting decision hinging on our past actions and then railroad us into a panic attack that ignores the glaring differences our past actions make to the situation at hand. That one move completely undercut all the good will DPC had built up reflecting our choices in small dialogues or altered scenes, all for a dumb twist plenty of us saw coming a season away. Clearly our decisions
don't matter.
On top of that, we get the return of Zoey, and in particular we get the Interlude. To me this signals that Season 3 isn't going to be about the MC and his chosen girl trying to make a go of the new relationship, it's going to be about the MC second guessing his decision at the crossroads. Sure, at first glance those seem to be two sides of the same coin, but I see it as a matter of emphasis. Zoey doesn't need her own side game if she's just going to be
a factor in the MC's new situation, she needs the Interlude if she's going to be
the factor in it.
Combine that with the fact Episode 9 is titled 'Vixens,' and it sure seems like DPC expects us as players to be torn up second guessing ourselves. Well, I'm just not. I made my choice ages ago and I've been waiting for the game to catch up; the thought that I'll have to slog through yet another season of limbo to get there is... off-putting. It should be up to us whether the MC second guesses his call at the crossroads - and even if DPC pulls rank and makes the MC sulk again, we need a chance to experience the changes his decision caused before we worry about branches not taken.
Basically, Episode 8 gave me the impression DPC is too invested in the small set pieces of the game at the cost of the overall narrative flow. The set pieces can still be a lot of fun, but they don't build into something larger. They just happen in a vacuum and we shouldn't worry about the convolutions necessary to get to the next piece. DPC won't let us make real choices because he's afraid we'll miss the good bits, and thus he undermines the illusion of choice that makes the game so enjoyable. My ultimate complaint about
Acting Lessons is that it felt like it was less than the sum of its parts; I'd hate to see something similar happen to BaDIK.
You are, of course, free to disagree, but that's how I see it right now. I'll still be thrilled to be proven wrong.
See above. And to be clear I still liked Episode 8, it just killed a lot of my enthusiasm for Season 3. I've gone from "I can't wait to see more!" to "...please don't fuck this up." Which has not made the wait for Episode 9 particularly enjoyable.
