What's with the recent hate around the game? Did something happen? I thought it's one of the greatest(?)
In general, it definitely is when it comes to the variety of scenes, alternate side story pathways, and other things. For example, I've yet to find a game that has ever done a bar storyline even half as well as this one. That whole side plot could've been a standalone spinoff game. They definitely excelled in how they developed certain side plots like that one, the porn one, the gloryhole, and some others. But they also clearly left some things half baked and unfinished, while others felt rushed.
The main storyline as well is not without its flaws as others have said, same with combat, and its very true that the whole pure vs non-pure mechanic, the deviations in the main story endings, and the limited scope of the three endings you could get was lacking. It felt like Jenna had made really good connections with most of the core party, but they weren't explored overly well in the endings or variety in some of the relationships where I felt there should have been. Like Jenna gets real close to the dancer girl for example, and it always felt like there could've been room for her in the "pure" ending too, at least imo.
There was also just not any leeway to having any positive outcomes even with non-pure interactions. It was an all or nothing situation in the "best" ending which kinda takes a way from a lot of the game imo. Not just because you can't see many scenes in that way, but also because straying from the pure path even minimally or in various stages shouldn't have meant some hard coded "choose between two bad endings no matter what." The other characters all had good endings in the best ending despite being "unpure" and a lot of that is supposed to be about not being able to control themselves and going through their own redemptions. It's not entirely their faults either. All in all there was plenty of room for variety in how things could've ended.
Anyway, it's definitely a case where the devs probably wanted to do a lot more than they ended up doing back when they were making this one, but they did still make a lot of content in general. It's a classic for sure, but not without the valid criticisms out there, including these recent critiques that people felt letdown in the story aspect and the later content considering how good the earlier content was.
Having said all that, I do think the devs have learned from their mistakes at least in so much that their new game, Third Crisis: Neon Nights, which is technically a prequel to this one but pretty removed from this one's story so far, is so high in quality right now even in its current early state. It's way beyond where Third Crisis was at the same stage in its development and its clear that they got rid of things that didn't work well in Third Crisis. There's no combat, no pure vs non pure mechanic, every aspect of the the setting is built from scratch down to the furniture in the buildings, there's a tighter core group of characters so far, a seemingly more flexible storyline, and so on. You can see just how much detail they're putting into the new game in their biweekly updates and how much they've improved, so I'm optimistic on that front.
Now all that said, it's going to be a big if as to whether they can pull it off in the end since development takes a long time and we've all seen games fall off midway, but if they do pull it off after learning from past mistakes, I think it'll far surpass Third Crisis and most other games like it on this site for sure and easily become one of the top H games one could play. Guess we'll see. Fingers crossed!