The square default texture style is all over the first mission, the time trial challenge. I have last seen that texture playing the in-progress maps in Ready or Not during its early access as well as for demo rooms in unity.
Yes, the "Not available yet" is clearly shown, that's the thing I have a bit of a problem with when it's said to be a final release. I do understand Arena is more of a test bed but with those, the "Not available yet", so prevalent on the main menu it gives the illusion of it not being complete for what was released.
Look at this from the consumer point of view, we are very stupid when looked at as a collective. Being told that we have a final release of something, even free, and see something that is 99% of the time only seen in early access titles, we will get confused and wonder why there are things missing. If when I loaded into the main menu and saw the "Not Available yet" options removed for the Arena release and instead saw a little advertisement to keep up with the development of the main bioasshard title on Patreon for the release of the campaign/story in the corner I would have a better idea of what exactly is going on. If I shown this release to a friend he would tell me it's still early access and that this would get updated, apart from it actually being a good project that go against all of the cookie cutter visual novels you see EVERYWHERE.
I totally get your point, and you're right. We should have made it the way you mention. It would have been better with a text saying that this option would be available in the Game and not in the Arena or something like that or just removed as you suggest. This is caused by two main facts:
1 - My lazyness 😅
2 - I didn't know we would end up publishing the Arena outside Patreon/Substar
And that's why I didn't accounted for that 😣.
About the square default texture though. They're not the default texture, that's a custom material and it's used on purpose on those missions (1 and 10) to make it look like it's a virtual reality environment. This is the asset link: https://www.fab.com/listings/a6ab4843-7c8a-47d1-912c-fc1c3553df23. And this is a picture of the real default texture:https://i.sstatic.net/5HwYT.png. Just wanted to clarify 😄.
I do see where I have my confusion with the square texture. Without much context going into the mission environmentally other than the skybox/background it does feel very tech demo like instead of a mission. Giving some grace to the matter I am going to assume that creating a story intro going into an environment like such would be much more fleshed out in the main game as there would be more story explanation for it.