Yup, I can't say it was smooth. That's why we taking dat much time on testing all open-world mechanics. The good thing, that it's only this time, the next updates will be much easier and faster
And...it's was a bad idea to spoil it to everyone. It's beta, with bugs, problems and etc. We want to make public release full ready, and now everyone can see this not fully ready version.
What the idea?
Speaking from experience as a playtester, this is a way harder transition than people realize.
Open world is hard to program and test because there's no set paths through the game. The player can try to trigger events in any order, so very careful attention must be paid to keeping plot progression in lockstep. But then if you're making an open-world with everything (love interests, fetishes, etc) optional, now you have to program it so all progressions are completely independent of each other. Not easy.
Unfortunately, as the developer you
know how things should be done, and subconsciously that limits your ability to be truly throrough when playtesting. At some point you do have to give it to the world to try, because ordinary players are really good at finding issues you unconsciously avoided. It's embarrassing, but it's now a proven approach - most large companies do alphas, betas, experimental, developer preview, pre-releases, etc to get that real life testing feedback.
This sounds like it may have been more an alpha-level release than beta. As you gain experience, you'll get better at knowing how close to release the game really is. Plus, this is the "heavy lift", once you've got the base mechanics sorted out here, as you said, further releases will be much simpler.
Keep at it. The quality of your art shows you've got the mindset to get this right, just push through the growing pains.
