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Notes -
It’s too easy to fall into the trap of wanting to see “all the content” and get the “best possible ending”. But it’s also because of a cycle in which most players will look up guides, pick the best choices, and then developers cater to that.
You can play Mass Effect in a kind of freewheeling way, and it’s a lot of fun because the renegade choices are (unlike the ‘pure evil’ in a lot of RPGs) actually often efficient and believable, moreso than the good ones. But in the end it also means (especially if you mix paragon and renegade in ME2 and therefore fail a bunch of mandatory checks) that half the main characters die and get replaced with no-name nobodies in the third game, which robs the narrative of much of its flavor.
A good RPG has a good creative writing prompt, and something like Skyrim or Avowed or Outer Worlds or Pillars is just very broad. There are always going to be those people who find themselves playing Geralt, monster slayer, and who still make every choice as if he were them, woken up in the body of this man one morning. And there are always going to be people who can take a (near) fully blank slate, like a classic MMO or an Elder Scrolls game and invent an elaborate 300 page backstory and moral code and adhere to it flawlessly. But I think there’s a big middle ground that is served by a protagonist whose already-existing story you take over for a time, and the voice helps with that, helps tell you “this isn’t you”.
The mechanics help with that, but players hate it. If you give a better outcome for playing stealthily for example, like Dishonored, most players will be mad and play through it anyway even if they have less fun, because they want the good ending, it’s a ‘win condition’. I would prefer a game where being awful helped you win in the end. Fable 3 came close but the property system was too easily manipulated.
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