Like him? Not necessarily but I would like for the players to get to know him first. Most players that dislike him do so largely because A) The things he did before I was the writer and B) the things he would do in the NTR path. Now if you're playing the non-NTR path strictly, he's a dick, sure but he's not nearly as big of a dick. And is judging him for the choices he didn't make in a given path really fair? Would it similarly be fair to call MC a mind-controlling rapist in the "good" path where he tries to be the best person he can be? I get that player decides what kind of person MC becomes with the choices he/she makes but the player will also decide what kind of person every NPC becomes as well with the choices he makes.
There is a big problem with the part I have underlined. In all the text in the game, when you prevent NTR, you are
STOPPING HIM FROM DOING SOMETHING HE WAS ALREADY GOING TO DO. This is not "blaming him for something he never did." This is judging a character by what he was already going to do without your intervention.
If you know someone is going to murder your wife but you stop him and divert his anger towards something else, are you going to say: "See, he's not so bad a guy, he didnt ACTUALLY murder my wife." No, you're going to get your wife as far away as possible and either kill the guy yourself or get him thrown in jail to make sure that doesn't happen next time.
The MC is completely different because there is no preconceived path, you are the one making the decision on what to do, you are not intervening on something that someone else was going to do.
My point is you cannot have an antagonist as a mentor type character. It just doesn't work unless you are evil and going for a Sith Master / Sith Apprentice thing. You're player will always see the antagonist as an antagonist and will
NEVER trust him or listen to a thing the antagonist says. I suspect when you finally do have diverging plot lines, Carl will not feature in the ones people play. Because they will either be evil to kill him and take over, or will join the "Good" side.
And yes, I fully admit that you will have players who will be unfairly biased against Carl for the removed scene before you joined the project, you can't put the genie back in the bottle as it were.. especially with antagonists.
A simple solution to this would of been to keep Carl as the antagonist and instead introduce one of the other "Shadowcasters" as the mentor. Possibly Sophia due to her possibility of the MC banging her. (Obviously we have no idea what she looks like, i just assume if she's an even halfway decent model some of the players will want to bang her.) This would allow Carl to be the heel he was meant to be from the structure of the game and give the MC someone to rely on in The Order, even if reluctantly.
Sorry if I seem like i'm beating a dead horse, I do ACTUALLY like the game so far, I just hate the fuck out of the set up with Carl as it is ATM. Though i'm so very glad i never played the game fully with the previous scene in place. I would of just added this to my ignore list otherwise so i'm glad I avoided it until the non-ntr path was playable.