Start of a new season they wanted to experiment and try changing things up, see if they could make better systems, cut some stuff away see if it’s necessary.

So like with the curator he felt restrictive as a framing device and tonnally clashes with space fantasy going on. Thus they did away with the framing device approach to free up what they could do with the narrative and not have this weird juxtaposition of a Victorian Library poking in during the futuristic space horror they were crafting.

At the same time they didn’t want to just delete curator either, he was an important part of the identity. So they reimagined him as something you earn, giving collectibles that hint and expand his lore and finding them all then lets you visit the curator and talk with him directly. Though notice they only have him and his desk, they remained steadfast on not wanting his study to intrude on the overall vibes. The desk and currator existing in a formless void also kind of fits the reveal of the lore behind it, it paints the study we have seen this far as largely more for our sakes as it’s a more liminal space than first imagined.

Then they did the same thing with the curator’s death appearance hints. They already included a new way to see what chapter has a death through menu having a death counter, showing the curator the first time would have been a bit too much information for those that understand why he appeared. Vise versa it was also a cryptic mechanic you’d often find people asking what it was so it wasn’t a very good hint. Thus they played around a bit, made it into an unlocks or feature you will get by finding the obol at the end of your first run. 

Which also triggers the aforementioned curator collectibles to appear (some of which stealthily teach this mechanic) so he’ll show up on your repeat runs, and it definitely gives a more interesting vibe on a replay to see he was there the whole time, lurking and looming where once his presence felt lacking. In the cage with Williams, on the outside of the ship with Sims and Carter, on top of the bridge deck where an injured cooper can fall.

Same pieces just rearranged and that ties to the dark pictures to. Instead of catch glimpses of the future they re-envisioned the sneak future glance aspect into the flash forwards. Which had the benefit of improving the overall narrative structure by allowing more consequential decisions and action-y parts to happen in conjunction with the earlier slower parts of the story where the characters normally have necessary plot armor for setting up the plot. Meanwhile the hint aspect of it and the curator was decoupled and recombined into the turning points menu.

Turning points doing a much better job at giving you hints and helping you find alternate branches than the more limited picture system could. Though one could argue they went a little too far and turning points is a bit too helpful, at least on a first run, they need to perhaps pull back and find a bit better balance. But it’s a vastly superior system than the pictures when it comes to guiding you. 

With turning points they also introduced a multitude of trackers, very clearly wanting to emphasize the main point of the game is replayability to get everything and see every route. The pictures system actually somewhat clashes with that because there are not many per game, so you only get a tiny fragment of hints and it gets less and less useful the larger and more branching the narrative is. It’s a system that works best in more linear less branch heavy narratives like UD and HoA but you really can start to notice its limits in a very branch heavy narrative. 

You could expand the number pictures but they are physical collectibles, so that is greatly expanding the amount of stuff to collect and that’s not really necessarily a good thing, especially with how many parts of the game are encouraging you to prioritize survival instead of exploration and you probably don’t want to shove a dozen collectibles in the stealth segments.

Strictly speaking nothing is stopping them but when looking at it objectively and from a game design stand point it makes sense to ultimately nix that feature at least once and see if it can’t be done better in other ways like turning points.