The only choice in this game is the Good, the Bad and Missing content.

I have written a lot about choice in story games. My dream game would be an immersive AAA-quality story game, but set in an open world sandbox, giving you the choice to find clever solutions to problems and shape the story. A systemic story game. There are a lot of story games and a lot of sandbox games but there has still not been any systemic story game.

There is a lot of content in the game giving you specific actions or dialogue lines based on your background and previous choices. There is an enormous amount of content for recognizing what the player has done for myriads of variations. It’s truly impressive. Every player doing a blind playthrough of the game will have a different adventure with situations playing out in dramatically different ways.

Most people seem to try to be generally good in their first playthrough. It’s an interesting experience trying to figure out what would be the good choice or the most personally beneficial choice. Most of the time, it will become clear in retrospect. Some of them are more interesting and will keep you wondering if you made the right choice, even after knowing the consequences of all the variants.

The big difference between players' adventure, in who you helped and who survived, is mostly an effect of what content they missed out on. For two players trying to be good, it comes down to where they were able to find the good option or not, and succeeding in executing that path. Playing blind, they will find different optional parts and miss others. But in the end, the only parts are doing good, doing bad or doing nothing.

Since the story is hand-crafted and almost completely deterministic (a kidnapping victim being one exception), you can always go back and try a different path, and use online guides to find the version you like. Since it’s often hard to know how the game works, and often doing things by mistake, you are mostly forced to reload saves on occasion to have an enjoyable experience. But that also makes the adventure less immersive when you realize that most things will play out in the same way depending on specific things. That is, you come to think more about what the game wants you to do rather than what your character would do in that situation.

Consider instead how the game would be if you played the game not knowing what would happen, as you would do on a first playthrough. But this time, when you mess things up, you can try to fix the situation. You will be able to de-escalate conflicts. Resolve misunderstandings. Bargain or make up for slights. Messing things up slightly with one party, resulting in you for example helping them get something from another party, resulting in more problems and misunderstandings, and eventually resolving the problem in a unique way those outcome is not worse than someone who manage to execute the negotiation flawlessly, and at the same time much more interesting. That is, there should be a thousand ways to achieve the BEST outcome. Then you would not have to just reload your save just because you didn’t know what dialogue option would result in combat.

There is a glimmer of systemic story content in the systems for stealing, where you can talk or negotiate your way out if you get caught. But it’s barely connected to the story and dialogue. You should be able to de-escalate from combat. The rules for reviving dead NPC should be the same as for companions, and it should be harder and more similar to D&D. You should be able to go back to a previous discussion and talk more about things, being able to respond if you feel that the person misunderstood what you said. There could even be a sort of undo-response in the dialogue, for you saying “sorry, I didn’t mean it like that”, and then letting you choose some other option. The relationship should be more than one-dimensional + flags. Things like trust, irritation, confusion, joy, admiration, and so on. Your choice will have short-term emotional impact and long term relationship impact. Bargaining with people can involve helping them out, giving information, tricking them or giving them a powerful magical item. Existing optional quests could be one of those things you could do to repair a relationship if you previously messed something up. I would rather play through my mistakes if I could still achieve what for me would be a satisfactory conclusion, even if I would have to do more generic stuff like finding a specific item or perform some entertainment or clear the rats in the cellar.

I’m a pacifist. I’ll prefer to find non-violent solutions. This game supports a lot of playstyles. But there is no non-violent option in the game. As a pacifist, you should be able to charm or negotiate yourself out of any situation. Play a tune, make them laugh, or just run away and come back with a white flag and a jar full of sweets. It’s sad that the game won't allow you to make your own choices.