I take my cue from what you have written, which is always interesting, to reiterate a conviction of mine
the idea that Josy is the brave one of the two is a collective misconception. in both big and small things, Maya is the one who takes risks, sometimes in a completely unconscious way, but in the end she does, going far beyond the stereotype of the introverted girl.
Of course with the fact that Maya ends up facing challenges beyond her reach, she ends up relying completely on those around her, but she always accepts the challenge.
p.s. the "no string attached" is a retcon, it has nothing to do with what happens before and after, it's only meant to warn the players that the ending was still very far away and in case to convince them to get into trouble
I agree Maya is not the coward some claim, though I wouldn't put it in terms of bravery; both Maya and Josy are willing to take risks for the other. But while Josy is bold and optimistic, Maya is cautious and pessimistic. Josy would rather confront Patrick head on and either force him to blink, or accept his ultimatum and spend the next few years rebuilding Maya's credit. Maya sees that as a worse outcome than pretending to accept the ultimatum spending the next few years either accelerating her studies or finding a new alternative (while seeing Josy in secret).
You can certainly say Maya is taking the path of least resistance and effectively giving up on Josy. But you can just as easily say Josy is too cavalier and expects Maya to bear 100% of the burden of defying her father. It's a case of having to pick from terrible options without an objectively correct one.
As for the "no strings attached" bit, retcon isn't quite the right word: this was definitely planned out ahead of time. I think the better word is "railroad;" DPC needs to narrow the choices available to the player to keep the story on the rails. Normally, DPC is pretty good at weaving these constrained choices into the narrative. This is one of the times when he wasn't able to do that.
I wish DPC would have shown us the rejection dialogue so we could see exactly what Jade was so
about. Her anger goes well beyond just being rejected by a
married woman who doesn't want to have a threesome with married co-workers. Jade actually seems to be in a rather good mood during that scene (mostly because of MC but still). That said, I'm sure Bella and Jade had a typical womanly rivalry (like you see in any office) before "the incident" but something clearly happened during or after the library scene.
I need to go back and watch the scene, but I recall Burke being at least partially successful setting up the date; although, I assumed Bella didn't believe it was a sex date at the time. Rather, I thought she took it to mean a co-worker get-together. That wouldn't be all that unusual. Certainly no stranger than getting together with students at your home and drinking with them.
Also, wasn't the "date" supposed to occur that Friday night? I'm trying to remember where Bella was on Friday night. Was that the evening of the Cathy photo debacle? If so, would Bella even have had the opportunity to meet up with Burke and Jade to discover the date was actually for sex? Need intel from someone who played this episode recently or remembers the chronological timeline of events.
That Friday night would have been the night after the DIK initiation. The MC and Derek have their shot contest, then the MC either goes home to see Maya's family pictures, doesn't get to fuck Sage on the dance floor, or does get to fuck Sarah in the closet (if he meets all the requirements).
We don't meet Bella on Saturday, because the MC goes home for his date with Josy. When we finally run into her on Sunday, she's doing Yoga with Jill and is clearly not in a good mood. It's hard to say how much of that might be related to Jade/Stephen though, since she still dislikes the MC in general at that point.
I haven't done a Bella playthrough in a long time. Things I need to research: Was the Burke/Bella/Jade date scheduled for Friday and where was Bella on Friday, and did Jade's picture throwing fight with Burke happen before or after the library scene? Was that fight a flashback? If so, how far back?
It's hard to say for certain. The timeline at the beginning of Episode 3 is a completely jumbled mess.
It starts with Chad getting the "blackmail" letters (though technically that was apparently a teaser at the end of Episode 2). Then we get the maybe-flashback scene with Jade and Stephen. Then comes the MC and and Derek at the mall (I think cutting ahead to just before their Gay Guard Catcher), the flashback to Rusty explaining the Pledge Board, the HOTs pool scene where Quinn offers free tuition to Maya and Mona, and finally Chad ambushing the MC. After that things go back to an orderly flow of time.
We can make reasonable guesses as to when each of these events take place, but there's simply no way to be certain.
My best guess is that the Jade/Stephen fight happened on Monday like most of the other events, but anywhere from Friday to Tuesday would be plausible.
If he wasnt greedy and used the money he has from his patreon and sales on steam to create a team rather than working on everything himself we would have the updates in a much faster time yet the money he is getting is not really going into the game.
Season 3 can be finished by the end of 2023 and the amount of content each episode we get right now does not justify the length it takes to develop.
I would have no problem to support him on patreon/steam but i see no reason when the money i will give him will not go into improving the game and the time it takes to develop. Dpc needs to stop being greedy and ask people to help him.
That's ridiculous. Hiring and managing people are extremely complicated endeavors that have almost no skill overlap with making 3D artwork or writing Python code. We know DPC is very good at the last two, but I have no reason to think he's any good at the first two; indeed, based on the way he runs his Patreon account, I'm inclined to think he isn't particularly good at them.
If DPC tries to hire a team, there's no guarantee he'd hire reliable, productive people, much less that the stress of managing those people would be less than the stress of trying to do everything himself. The only thing that
would be guaranteed is that productivity would drop in the short term as DPC is forced to divert his time for the hiring and training processes.
Believe me, I'm as unhappy about the likely 3-8 year path to finishing BaDIK as anyone, but IMHO asking DPC to hire a team is a cure far, far worse than the disease.
to say this, shouldn't we see what the result would be if he had collaborators?
then actually he has already opened up to external collaborators (the author of the 2d renderings), did you perceive a drop in quality?
otherwise it's an act of faith
As I just mentioned, there is actually a very high opportunity cost to DPC trying to build a team. I don't think it's worth the risk.
I'd much rather encourage him to reign in the size of updates and try to maintain a 5 month cadence when possible. That's still going to be very difficult because the guy's a perfectionist, but I think that's a much better, and far safer, hill to die on.