ILLUSION OF CHOICE
But do you know what’s even worse than painfully binary choices? The illusion of choice. When a game tells you, or heavily implies, that the things you do are going to matter, that the decisions you make are going to affect the story in radical ways, and goes out of its way to really make it look that way in those particular moments- but as the game progresses, you realize that that’s not really true, that at most, some dialogs might get slightly altered, or some scenes might be slightly different, but the larger beats of the story are mostly going to remain the same. “Clementine will remember that”, the game tells you. Will she, though? Will she really?
When Mass Effect 3 tells you that whether or not you saved the Rachni queen will have an impact on the progression of your story, it’s not being entirely honest.
