If mechanically there's no much consequence to anything, any such story hook is hollow.
This is actually something that's prominent in Cyberpunk 2077 too. What with Act 2 beginning with "Oh noes, the Relic is killing you. You have a couple of weeks at best until your brain turns to jelly" and the consequences are... Nothing. Scripted scenes while doing main story missions are the only evidence of its impact.
What's worse, is people keep clamouring for MORE of this lack of consequence. Many people are wishing that despite all the endings for the game being the end of the protagonist, V's, story. They wish for deus ex machina to be written so that V can be the protagonist again in its sequel. All while not understanding how much this undermines the entire premise of choosing an ending and its varied results.
Originally Posted by Sven_
Witcher 3 meanwhile? No dice. That never was a wholly satisfying gaming experience to me, as the game systems are paper thin. But it's still one of the harbingers of decline in my book.
Witcher 3 has underwhelming systems (Albeit it's the best of the trilogy, which says a lot about W1 and W2...)
Though, what it does well is its narratives. Not only does the main narrative run a coherent path from early in Geralts career as a Witcher, to his eventual ending at the tail end of Witcher 3. But it also has side quests that dive into lore and deepen the world (Even if they're implemented in a linear and handholdy way).
Which is something about video games in general. Games are often being highly rated for one of two reasons: The first is from a gameplay perspective, a game like Elden Ring is GotY because it's simply fun to play, a mechanically enjoyable experience. The second is the narratives, a game like Witcher 3 is GotY because the narrative is excellent, it's an engaging story within an interesting world.
Despite video games offering the option to have its cake and eat it by essentially being far superior to books and movies (Which can only stand out based on its overall narrative alone because there is no interaction - Outside of those "Choose your own adventure" books), we generally don't see titles that actually do both aspects well. A game that is both mechanically interesting AND has excellent narrative is a unicorn.
Perhaps we need some of Ubisoft's coined "AAAA" gaming development to provide the necessary resources for games to have adequate development into both aspects of a game. Though, I'd wager the biggest thing is simply allocation of resources...
Take BG3 for example, plenty of resources were dumped into appearance. The more detailed models, the motion capture and animations, the graphics and cinematics... They could have had a more basic looking game similar to other CRPG's and invested the time and money into enhancing the narratives and actual game systems. But they didn't.
It's something that has been bothering me for a while in video games. This need to be the prettiest thing to ever be rendered on people's top of the line PC's, despite it being not only useful for a minor portion of the playerbase (Console players and most PC users are limited by hardware anyway), but it's overall irrelvant to the actual product... I can literally go pick up a great PS1 title and it's still a great game even if it looks like ass because mechanically or narratively it is competent. Meanwhile shiny modern titles that look pretty are often shallow and uninteresting. Like, I get developers doing this back in the day, because Crysis was literally noteworthy only because of how far it pushed graphical performance (To the point where it took years before PC's could even actually handle it at full specs) and publishers like to hop on bandwagons created by any singular noteworthy title... But these days, it's just like, who honestly cares? All this work just to polish a turd of a game...
