These opportunities are game-driven though, not player-driven.
You can't just decide spontaneously "You know what, I hate my current faction. I'll march over to their rivals and sell them out for a decent reward.", you can only decide such a thing when the current quest you're in offers you the opportunity.
Almost as if game waits for an opportunity for your character to be in a position of power / value to the opposing faction for them to consider you worthy of conspiring with. Crazy.
Which ultimately leads to the feeling of it being railroaded, due to the decision only being available at
one specific point in the game rather than being available during a certain timeframe.
Say, once you reached rank X and have access to some faction secrets, you might want to decide to defect and other factions would have great interest in gaining you.
Yet you don't get that option, you only get such decisions when you encounter certain quest situations. Only during that specific situation you can make that choice.
Ultimately, it makes the game feel less player-driven and more like a CYOA because of how it's all handled.
How AoD does a quest and choices:
Tough girl who leads the assassins tell you that your next assassination target is an influential noblewoman. The hit is planned for tonight. You start the quest by telling her you're ready.
Once you tell her you're ready, you get to enter the noblewoman's mansion. The choice on whether to barge in frontally, diguise yourself, or climb in through the balcony is offered as three dialogue choices with skill checks attached to them.
Once inside, you don't get to move around freely. Instead you get to the next CYOA style choice after confronting the noblewoman. She offers you to betray the assassins and work with her instead. You can accept her offer or reject it and kill her.
Essentially, the quest structure is:
A: tell your boss you're ready
B: decide on the infiltration method
C: depending on the infiltration method, you will reach the target in a different way; now choose between defecting or doing your job
D: be teleported back to your headquarters after finishing the quest
AoD's problem is a structural problem. Yes, the game is still fun. Yes, it does offer a lot of choice. But since everything in-between the choices is trimmed out, it still manages to feel railroaded.
How I would do that very same quest:
Tough girl who leads the assassins tells you your next target. She says the hit has to be performed soon, so you only have three days to do it.
It's up to you whether to go in during the day or at night. During the day there will be more passersby on the streets. During the night there will be more guards in the manor. Both approaches come with their own benefits and drawbacks. It's up to you when to strike, depending on what you find more or less risky. Since the Boatmen are kind of a semi-legal organisation, you wouldn't get in trouble with the law for causing a public ruckus, but maybe you'll get less of a reward if you do, so striking during the day when you can be seen by passersby might be a bad idea. But during the night there will be more guards inside so it will be harder.
You decide on how to approach the target on your own initiative. If you learned that the noblewoman keeps a bunch of combat-trained harem girls as bodyguards, and you play a female character, you can wear that harem style dress and a veil to attempt to disguise yourself. When you enter the manor and are stopped by guards, you get a skill check on your disguise skill to see whether they realize you are just a fake or not. If you have a rope with grappling hook in your inventory and approach the balcony, you can click on the balcony to interact with it and use the rope to get up rather than walking through the building. Instead of the game giving you "use a disguise" or "climb up the blacony" as choices in a CYOA style dialogue segment, you have to come up with these solutions on your own. If you wanna disguise yourself, you just put on the appropriate clothes and when guards spot you, you get to make a diguise check. If you wanna climb up the balcony you need to have a grappling hook and need to approach the balcony on your own to check if that is an option.
This approach would be more player-driven. The player has to explore the place, the player has to come up with the alternate solutions to the quest that involve more trickery than just barging in through the front door. Rather than just handing the player all possible options as dialogue choices, the options have to be explored by active gameplay and it will feel less railroaded despite giving the exact same amount of choices. They're just structured and presented differently.
