>>9515822think it had a bit to do with memory limitations. another early game that had branching paths was hilarious touhou 1 (who the fuck even plays that one), you chose after the first boss whether to go to hell or go to the, uh, world of magic or something
but basically the longer a media is out the more optimized developers get with putting things on it, as well as cleverness in design. it's how gen2 pokemon put almost the entire gen1 cartridge on the same game, by reusing assets and making better use of memory. i'm willing to bet branching paths disappeared for a bit because the end of the 90s marked the switch off cartridges to discs and developers were iffy on playing around. a later example of cleverness is if you reverse-engineer the hex code of FE:PoR and RD isos show that they actually reuse the same engine and the development thus focused on plot and graphics. those two are probably the best games in the series
as far as modern things games are running into a problem of laziness that detracts from game quality. you have mobile games making money off of what is essentially gambling for pictures, you have modern AAA studios following trends too hard (like everyone and their mother making open worlds or shooters when those were in vogue), you have politics interfering with design sometimes or dated and misguided leadership in eastern studios (like nintendo still clinging to motion controls and subpar hardware), and indy developers have some clever ideas but lack the manpower, budget, and drive to make things bigger and better, instead stuck in a retro-rut
so for an example of choices in games gone wrong if you don't know, FE:fates had a "choice" after several chapters of which faction to support, but they decided that the depth of the different plots demanded it be split into multiple games, so the plot has a "choice" but you are limited to whatever version you bought. and the game is still lazily designed and written even with that separation
