And if a game doesn't support such dynamic range, then you have something in which your choices don't matter.
If you explicitly set out to favour some choices over others, that will not help. It'll just result you in putting development effort into things that nobody in their right mind will pick, and that's always effort that could've been spent on things people will do.
This is really interesting, because from a player perspective, I think
agris is totally right. I love that notion of 'dynamic range'. There's an unsurpassable sense of character ownership when your wizard heads to the Council of Wizards and actually gets some credit for being a wizard - and the same goes for when your filthy rogue is kicked summarily out of the front gates. That's the stuff players talk about for years to come ('time for my rogue playthrough, I'm going to massacre those stuck-up bastards once I get to them').
And developers
shouldn't necessarily feel that this means they need to create a bunch of analogous content for the Council of Druids, the Council of Barbarians, the Council of Half-Elf Dual-Classers, because that way madness lies.* Not just because it's a massive, near-infinite amount of work, but because you're likely to run out of imagination by the fourth faction and the whole thing has the potential to end up feeling stretched-out, meaningless and flat. ('I got my ticket to the Duke's ball from the Council of Druids.' 'Great. I got mine from the Council of Shamans.')
But equally, I don't think these things can come about because a project leader consciously makes a plan like, '
OK, while the rest of you are working long hours getting the main storyline complete before deadline, Dave here is going to be writing unique godlike content for, like, 5% of players. Just a shitton of godlike content.
And it'll all need C&C. That's what we're paying Dave for.'
Nor should they, obviously - because that's terrible planning and practice. You just can't legislate for that stuff while you're devoting all of your resources towards building out a base player experience.
Instead, they usually seem to happen in a looser phase of development, if and when resources are spare, and one devoted individual is inspired or crazy enough to say, 'Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I...?' and then take the majority of the burden on their own shoulders.
The Malkavian dialogue, for example, was mostly banged out by a sleep-deprived Brian Mitsoda
after everything else. He's pointed out himself that actually,
it wasn't that much work, because for the most part the other characters don't react to the Malkavian PC, and the script structure doesn't change. So a lot of it was just a matter of going through the dialogue swapping out normal answers for crazy answers.
Likewise, I've always thought
Mask of the Betrayer was a really smart example of a game whose developers knew what to devote time to, and what to drop. As Kevin says in the interview, they stopped wasting development time with complicated (and ugly) NWN2 cutscenes, and just poured the writing into the NWN1-style dialogue box instead. They avoided massive, sprawling quests, to keep the writers focused. And as a result, the entire team had enough time left over to create a whole new, fully-fledged quest-zone - Ashenwood. Which is awesome.
But even then, they were still close to cutting one companion entirely (Kaelyn), and it took Chris Avellone swooping in to the project from elsewhere like the US cavalry and saying, 'If I make the time to write her, can we keep her?'.
So with a game like PoE, where we now know that writing resources were extremely tight (only one revision? Jesus), are we honestly saying that we'd prefer the writers and scripters required to have built out the godlike content, if they'd had an extra month or two? Rather than, for example, improving the main storyline, building out the factions, adding more content to Twin Elms, or writing better content for the stronghold? It's a tough call.
*Well, or AoD. But I'm talking in generalities.
