I don't think choices lack meaning just because they don't take you down a branching path that's wildly different. I think all it takes for a choice to feel meaningful is for it to meaningfully say something about your character. I think that the most important sorts of choices in that regard are the smaller ones. The ones that make variations on the path which make it more unique, regardless of the ending.
I think this is really well put and reflects my view too. I prefer not to get tied into one of just two or three clearly defined paths (eg good and evil), but rather to be able to pick my way through decision points and story beats in multiple different ways which are given different flavours depending on what has gone on before, for twistier and more morally grey stories for at least some of my characters.
But whether we’re talking about significant branches in the story or multiple smaller decisions, I agree that any cRPG is going to need to have mutually exclusive choices of some kind to feel meaningful. Without seeing the foregoing discussion on Reddit it’s hard to be sure, but I suspect that the negative reaction mentioned may have at least partly been because no one was actually disputing that and rather what was being discussed was more artificial gating of content that didn’t have a decent rationale, such as we get when companion conversation triggers get overwritten. Personally, I think that replayability is a poor reason for restrictions like that and, eg, forcing us to pick a limited number of companions past act 1, when these don’t make independent narrative sense. That in no way means I object to getting different content based on my choices when that
does make narrative sense.
That is, I think replayability is a consequence of good, flexible game design rather than something that developers should attempt a shortcut to by more-or-less arbitrarily restricting the amount of content available in a single playthrough. And while I suspect that I will replay BG3 again and again and would want each experience to be different, I have a lot of sympathy with those who would prefer to spend their time otherwise and who would therefore resent not being able to eke full value from their single playthrough because content
that there is no good reason they shouldn’t be able to experience is made either totally unavailable or unreasonably difficult or counterintuitive to access in the course of a single run.
