Outside of the points of digress that make little to no sense, yes, you are. You absolutely are. There's tons of points where it would make sense to do various things, but you can only do those things if you're on the right set of rails, even though you are essentially running through the same areas and situations.
I am near the end and in my game I got a whole area I never got a chance to visit.
That has nothing to do with you being on rails or not, and if anything, assuming you're talking about Lethian's Crossing vs. Burning Library, it's
because you're actually on rails and the game forces you to do X after Y resolutions.
Yea it is not Fallout like where you are trust into a huge world and if you really want to you can immediately go to end game areas but not every game needs to be Open World to be good.
One of the most Beloved games is Vampire Bloodlines and that game is very on rails if Tyranny is on rails, it is more on rails than Tyranny.
One thing does not invalidate another. Also, I meant narratively and terms of characterization when I referred to the rails - you can go wherever the hell you want, it's just that you can't actually do anything that diverges from the rail that has been said - aside from the mentioned points of digress
that makes no sense.
When I first played the game, I actually
started cataloguing all annoyances and issues I ran into, but I ended up stopping because it felt like the list was actually just growing exponentially as I kept playing the game. And here I am again, trying a different set of tracks, only to figure out that hey, look, it's the same shit all over again. I can't even make the Vendrien Guard swear fealty to me and have it develop in a way that makes any sense whatsoever, even if you follow the dialogue in a way that makes the most sense, it's immediately assumed afterwards that I'm going to play the Disvafored and the Scarlet Chorus against eachother, with clear malicious intent, even though it hasn't even been brought up prior to that point and makes no sense whatsoever, and very much turns me into a traitor when the intent is entirely the opposite.
I can probably play an hour and find 5-10 issues like this, some minor, some major, and most often, if you want to leave the given set of rails, the only way to do so is to go BWAHAHAHA I KILL U NAO. At other times, when that would make perfect sense, the option is simply missing. Just in the prologue as I've played through it this time, I can think of at least 4 different issues at the top of my head that I didn't experience last time.
And the
entire game is like this. It's infuriating, and I have no idea how anyone can think the writing is good or how half the things you do make sense.