I agree with all those points, even though I like Kate playthrough better than Max.
DS definitely wasted too much time on Nick. While in the earlier versions, the Nick+Julia path seemed somewhat promising, it got boring pretty fast once Kate got over her inhibitions.
Mostly, Kate being put in embarrassing situations only works if she's actually still somewhat shy, otherwise it isn't exactly embarrassing.
It would've probably been a better idea to open up more questlines than continue existing ones in each update. There were some promising avenues to be explored that would have been far more entertaining before Kate was as "open" as she is now:
- Classmates: Joining a band with Mike, Cosplaying with Ruby, Clubbing with Helen, Gymming with Dennis, Modelling with Sophie, etc. Was also hoping for more hacking events involving Andrew. The Andrew+Karen questline is fine, but seems like it lacks potential.
- Jogging in the morning with Julia which never happened
- The hotel was supposed to have a mechanic in which Kate would be penalised if she got caught stealing items while cleaning rooms.
- Endless opportunities with the medical room and pills.
Also, the phone is criminally under-utilised. So many selfies that have yet to see the light of day
Your point about the open world is especially true. I feel like the cafe, the mall and Julia's club at least could have benefited from having some random events with different people. If the club Helen's so fond of ever opened up on the map, that might have had some interesting opportunities as well. The mall feels especially empty.
And, while the college punishments is one of the best questlines, it would have probably been better to progress the different college committee branches (uniform rules, biology classes, etc) simultaneously than to complete the punishment branch first.
If you look at the concept images from before v0.1 came out, you can tell there were a lot more interesting mechanics planned that were never implemented:
I should also mention that I still do like Kate's playthrough. I complain because I care
I liked the last Max update as well, it's slowly starting to grow on me. The problem with the Max playthrough is that I keep comparing it to the original BB and it keeps falling short
. Someone on these forums (I forget who) pointed out that it's mainly due to the lack of incest which adds an element of taboo to the gameplay. I know you can change the NPC mapping, but it's not the same. Nothing Max does feels as taboo in this game as it did in BB.
