I can only speak for myself. In case of WiAB disjoined and idiotic was the old version.
The new chapters 1-3 were good, but I didn't quite get where this was heading to. It felt like another slice of life story, only Leia's club and Fred's farm were a bit out of line and disturbing. But who cares how people make money, right? In some games, they run a brothel with student prostitutes right on the college campus grounds, using dorm bathrooms as gloryholes.
With Chapter 4, everything that came before in the new WiAB made sense in the light of the new information that was revealed about the criminal families, their confrontation, and the characters' place in that structure. Their actions now have motivation and reasons, and the dialogues - meaning. I like it.
Fine that you like it, personal taste, I loath this update so much I removed WIAB from my sig! It might be because I look with writer´s eyes on it and see how Ocean destroyed the character designs to fill the plot holes he created with soap opera mafiosi of the worst kind.
Even in the oldest versions of WIAB to new WIAB 1-3 it was an obvious fact that parts of the Zane family, e.g. Uncle Joe, engaged in semi- and illegal"enterprises". But it was also very clear it was a side theater and the legal undertakings were vastly bigger and the main focus.
The Zanes had internal problems, the rather serious feud between the older siblings with the younger sister, how the disparate family branches functioned together and Dylan/Helen trying to keep the criminal element in check. Then there were the external problems, rivals from both the legal and illegal competitors and the rising gang problem.
Dylan and Helen loved their kids, even when they exaspirated them and peace between the siblings and Kati was rare. Then Dylan fled because he and Leia had become closer than siblings should be and Kati used at least part of this secret to blackmail him. All this led to a situation of the lost son (and his girlfriend) returning home after a disaster hit and Leia called him.
This was underlined by many small bits and pieces of evidence during the game and that it was hard for Willi being away. He talked lovingly in WIAB 1 about how he often thought about home, the others and how he missed them.
This was a perfectly fine and fitting beginning and could have been kept like this even if Leia would have been removed as a LI to cut the incest arc away. The story fitted the characters and vice versa.
Now with this incredibly stupid rewrite the backstory and many events do not fit the characters any longer! One glaring example Helen. In the new WIAB 4 she went from loving, if sometimes taxed Mom to an ice-cold hardcore criminal. Willi and Leia were only raised for her future gain, no love lost on those two, Helen was at least co-responsible for the deaths of Willi and Leia´s parents (keeping him the sole living Grimaldi for their own gain) and it is very clear from WIAB 4 that Helen and Willi parted ways on less than amiable terms and she left him in prison for good.
There is no even partly feasable reason for Willi to ever return to Wollust! He would never crawl back to and for Helen, a person which hurt and betrayed him so much as the new storyline shows. It is also clear from the time since he left (around 7 years) that the assinine rules Ocean sucked out of his fingers are obviously not enforced where he lived, several people knew where he was.
The feud between Willi/Leia and Kati is now another big plothole. Kati is the blood daughter of Helen and Dylan, Willi and Leia two kids they only raise for later profits, they do not even like them. The first or second time the siblings would really harrass Kati the two would live through a blue wonder of punishment. Afterwards the two would never even look strangely at Kati again.
The Zanes are all now hardcore criminals and Willi, who grew up there, is completely baffled by this, another plothole big as a SUV. Shows that the old backstory is the real one. The new one is Ocean brownnosing Patreon to keep SG safe from banishment and is thrown together to at least partly plug the holes.
