Cough cough Mass Effect cough cough Cyberpunk 2077 cough cough

I personally find the most important part of those choices isn’t the actual effect, but whether the game managed to immerse me enough so that I care.

For example, in Life is Strange, there’s a string of choices you can make that will get someone killed (or save them). The game invests enough time in the character before hand so when you come to the crossroads, the decisions FEEL very important. Do those choices have any big effects on the game? Not really. The character isn’t part of the main story line anymore after that, you only get some people referencing the difference. But if FELT important.

Think about the polar opposite: Choices that change the entire game, but you aren’t invested in. Would those be interesting choices, or would that just be 2 games in the form of one, and the choice is just a kind of “game select screen”.

I absolutely hate that concept, as even when, or especially if, it matters, it’s in the most cookie-cutter binary in-your-face kind of way, literally “(a) eat baby (b) safe baby”.

I don’t mind choice in games, but it should be actual choice, i.e. you do things because you want to do them, not because you think they will make the story go to the “good ending” or worse yet, be forced on you to stay on the good path, as the game is only build for good and bad path and everything in the middle is just mechanically broken.

The best choices in games are fully mechanics driven or just cosmetic, though that’s pretty damn rare in narrative games. In most games choice is generally just bad and annoying, as you aren’t focused on the actual game or story, but on what the writer might consider to be the “good way”.

That good old fragile “suspension of disbelief” gets shattered by choice systems very very easily.