b e a r d
"games as an art form" was truly disastrous for the industry. it is totally okay to make your game have a lot of artistic value, but it also needs to justify its existence as a game instead of some other type of media, like a movie for instance. if all you do is move the stick around and push a button every now and then in between exposition and cutscenes it's almost like your game would be better as a movie... just something to watch instead of play.
@susie visual novels aren't games. they're visual novels. that's why a lot of people have started calling particularly cutscene-heavy games "interactive films" lol.
@beardalaxy @susie I completely support the sentiment that kinetic novels are peak gaming: fuck making choices and doing pretty much anything, I do enough of that IRL
@susie @tomie >"you missed talking to this npc before doing X and now you can't do their questline" is very no-no
my game definitely doesn't have any of that 
lol there are a couple instances of not being able to do a quest if you've already done a different one because they conflict, that's really it. most of the time you can still do quests if they interact with each other at all, they'll just be slightly different.
I found that's the reason why I didn't get further than act 1 on Baldur's Gate 3. Fuck making choices that actually matter. Or not just making choices, but the constant FOMO of missing some encounter or resting at the wrong moment or interacting the "wrong" way (game misunderstood what I meant with it) etc. Even in Elder Ring I found out I was supposed to meet with so-and-so, but for some reason I didn't (and now that interaction is forever gone). Otherwise Elden Ring seems to be okay with the "explore and fuck around without worrying about triggering stuff" way of playstyle.
Games like Mass Effect, Skyrim and most mmorpgs got it right: there shouldn't be missed content, just different content. Doesn't mean it has be to entirely linear, but FOMO sucks ass.