No, my words don't contradict themselves, you're just not understanding. SG is based on events that have already happened in WiaB. Events in SG are affected by this (the Zane presence). So they are both part of the same overall meta narative. That is what the series is. But SG has a different protagonist, and it remains to be seen if Willi gets any meaningful role in SG. Already we have the conditions that the player can't chose something that leads to Katie's death, and that Ayua is a Zane, Leia, Willi, Kaite, Zoey and Emilio survive whatever happens. Choices that could impact those facts for SG can't be taken, or the game is not connected. It is that simple. The more OCean writes about what happened 20 years earlier in SG, without having finished WiaB, the fewer meaningful choices he can write into WiaB. If for example, Katie does a big reveal of the turf war that leads to the Zane's gaining a business empire that includes the college, he gives away the plot of WiaB, and makes WiaB a kinetic novel. In order for the WiaB choices to be meaningful, he can't give away too much of what happened before in SG.
Now, we know Ocean has said that decisions from WiaB at some point WILL be carried over to SG. I honestly don't think he'll do that though. He has to have coded it in from the start of SG, and he has to have written all the variables in from a finished WiaB. WiaB isn't finished, and SG doesn't have any code connecting the saves that I know about, or any flags related to pre-existing choices. It would be a massive rework to retrofit the changes, unless they are cosmetic script based 'lore' (ie what happened before just being recounted to the new generation)
If I consider a AAA game such as the ME trilogy, each game builds on the previous game, choices made in the first game affect the third. But the series started from the first game, and was developed in a linear fashion. Ocean made a mistake in some ways allowing development on SG before fiishing WiaB. A good example of this is Steven Erickson and Ian Esslemont, writing a series together. Erickson did 6 books before Esslement did his first, so the series is entirely flavoured to Erickson. The idea is that two people can create a more vibrant world, but it requires people to work as a team. In SG's case, that didn't happen, and Ocean picked up the slack. So now we're in a situation where the development is happening in parallel.
No, boring is a personal opinion. We will never know what would have happened if Ocean hadn't repeatedly paused WiaB's development for SG. Patrons were bored by waiting, as they are now. Helen carrying a gun and Willi an Axe in new WiaB previews is far from boring. But everyone has their preferences, it's no big deal that you find a story boring. There are many patrons who just want Bella, Sasha or Nami lewds and don't really care about the story even of SG. They just like the eye candy. I happen to like the story of the new WiaB far more than the story of SG, but currently the characters of SG have better emotional complexity, so I do like SG a lot as well.
If you're fast forwarding the 'chatter' how do you even know the details of the story though? The 'chatter' is where the story predominantly happens, the chatter explains what you see on the renders. I'm guessing you fast forwarded through the book club? This would explain why you don't know all the connections/insinuations between the games.
See this is where you are wrong. Speed won't always be comfortable. Just like he's rendering (foolishly in my opinion) scenes with 32 characters. This will have effects on the basketball games. 32 is more than enough for two teams and coaches but he'd better not do too many bystanders. Or he acts with sense and stitches renders together. But these moments in the game with large numbers of characters at full complexity will slow his comupter down. So look at the current dev time for both games and divide the number of renders currently by the number of days. That will give you the average Ocean speed. He'll have just as many hiccups. THere is no comfortable speed - because we don't know if one update (the gala when it happens, or a big basketball match) will have 32 characters the whole update (I Hope not) and that WILL slow the game development down. So I'll stand by my words. Two updates a year for both games would be an amazing result, and is within the capabilities of Ocean to deliver. He can do faster, but he'll get overambitious in some ways - simply because he's always trying to impress. His efforts to do too much make the game better, but also hamstring him.
