Part 2 had the free roam to find little extra scenes too in the beginning. You could explore the city to find out what the side characters was doing before going home. There was even a side story about our coworker's wife having a affair with a manager when Kirito started working if you don't remember. I think that was the woman from the park!
But then Fujino stopped all that and streamlined the game. I think it was because the issue of too many events in maps causing bugs. If that was true then Part 2 got too big and complicated to have side events.
Part 3 when!!?!?!?
Joke aside, here is a simple easy lore for part 3. Inoda fucks Asuna so harshly that she hit her head on the wall or something and she got brain trauma. She stays in the hospital for months, and because of hitting her head, she forgets about Inoda but clearly remembers and loves MC (forgot the boi's name lol). Oh boy oh boy, corruption starts at the beginning again.
Imagine how Inoda reacts when Asuna forgets him, and what will he try to do to make her himself again.
Yeah, the truth is that after a certain point doing a Part 3 would have been the smart choice, but Fujino outright REFUSED to do so (Despite that being the whole reason he stopped Part 1 in the first place) because otherwise it would have made all the "choices" and "corruption" system he had implemented so far worthless as he would have to rest it in the new game/part, so he decided to soldier on as things are and...yeah O,O
No, it was a poll initiated by Fujino
Like 4-kun said here, it was a poll initiated by Fujino himself, but this is actually partially the fault of people completely not thinking in the slightest about implementation: Alice won handily that poll because she's, well, Alice, she's without a doubt the most popular SAO heroine after Asuna, but the great majority of people voting for her to appear in Fujino's game were very clearly thinking of "Canon Alice getting 'stolen from Kirito' by Inoda/some random man too" (Even though Alice's feelings are even more painfully one-sided than Suguha's in Canon and is arguably even less NTR-like lol). Obviously, with how the game was set and things went, there was NEVER any realistic way for Fujino to write such a thing, which is why the Alice that got implemented in the game was basically an OC with her face and name with just some very vague characteristics relating to Alice's character and nothing more, and so most people from the beginning just didn't care much about her, ESPECIALLY when Fujino very clearly gave up on trying to build a relationship between her and Kirito early on (You can still see he was trying to write her as gaining a crush on him at first after all) because he realized how forced that would feel and decided to go the route of her and Klein to have her "really NTR-ed" when she was inevitably brainwashed.
Of course, nobody who actually voted for Alice to be in the game gave 0 shits about Klein or about some made-up and forced relationship between them, so even most of those who voted for her to be in the game from the beginning quickly got sick of Alice and thus she became the most boring character for most XP
