honestly “this game is a number of acts, each with a number of quests, and the end state of the quests in the previous act influences the quests in the current act” is a really effective way of structuring a game to produce meaningful choices and also seems completely alien to contemporary open‐world game design
but act structures peaked with Dragon Age 2 and now people are like “you can go where you want and do what you want!!” but there’s no way of like, quantifying that into meaningful narrative progression because every quest has to stand on its own
@Lady Dragon Age 2 deserved better
(i’m upset about the death of act structures for different reasons because i liked them in zelda but)