The Mall scene is easily the weakest overall from the early part of the game. The voice acting, the "logic" of what happens, it's all stuff that's pretty bad (and, coupled with all the comments about those videos some ass posted of the first few minutes of the game, makes for a pretty weak opening). This is stuff that the preview builds made pretty clear as the game quickly ramps up in quality of nearly everything by the time even those preview build levels were done. As for the full game... Well, February 10th can't get here soon enough. I promise you, there will be more discussions in reviews and once the embargo is up
at length about how this game is attempting to push the medium in interesting new directions.
It's taking everything in me to just try to go to sleep instead of re-playing the whole game from the start and doing everything differently this time. I'm
very curious to see how things will work out when characters are dead. Hell, I just want to see if I can pile on a bunch of early game

-ups to make a difference toward the end. The problem is that I don't want to ruin the illusion. The experience I had was so damn memorable, and half the fun is going to be comparing stories of how people got through the game differently because of their choices.
It does definitely seem like there's quite a bit of nuance to things; discoveries minutes and even seconds before some dialogue happens can make for more/varied conversation. It's really a nice touch, so it's quite possible that without actual dialogue breakdowns, some people may not even realize their games are different. That's definitely cool.
Oh, and the second "big crowd" scene in the game owns the
shit out of the Mall, so don't worry.