I'm always tempted to weigh in on these Nicki discussions. But I'm fascinated by how people can have such radically different reads on her, and I don't want to quash that by giving my take.
MC has multiple paths to follow, so if players don't want the "dark" stuff, then they won't choose it. LIs—to a certain extent—only has one path. Nicki will always ghost MC no matter what, Gabbi will get "abused" by her ex no matter what, Britt's relationship with her mom will always be fucked up no matter what, etc.
It's not hard to understand why folks cut MC some slack if you put all above into perspective.
This will begin to change with the next update, in pretty apparent ways. We've mostly seen MC interact with the girls at the beginning of their journeys, but now we're seeing what their lives look like with MC in it.
Off the top of my head: Viola's path will take a dramatic divergence with the next update based on how you treated her, Nicki's position in your life will potentially be in for a big change, and Brittani will have two possible career paths the MC can guide her down. You can also expect Gabby's relationship with Madison to change a lot, based on the MC's actions.
But, I'm still trying to avoid falling into the trap of having the story fork too much, so I'm being kinda ginger with all that for now. Still, my one big regret about Chapter One is that MC aiding Nicki ultimately didn't change much for her, in a material sense. But, I'd like to see what I can do to change that, in the reboot.
In other news, I made some good rendering progress today, so I decided to do a little gabby image with different hairstyle. I think it looks a little punky, while making her read a little more mature.
