This year’s open-world RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker and its myriad choices got me thinking: What does it really mean for your choices to matter in a video game? Typically, we think it’s a good use of branching narratives when you have a properly big, dramatic effect on how things play out or when you have hundreds of endings. Just look at how so much attention on Baldur’s Gate 3 focused on its endings or, years before, how everyone tended to ignore the smaller ways the Mass Effect trilogy changed across three games in favor of looking at the restrictive outcomes in Mass Effect 3.
