That's part of the beauty of games taking after classic tabletop RPGs. You may have a main story to follow, you're still relatively free to do things your own way. Not as much as in tabletop RPGs though, sadly.
Haha, thanks a ton. But yeah to get the freedom of pen and table it'd be... oh gosh I don't know what we'd need actually. That seems like a million dollar kind of project, even ShadowRunfailed to live up to the absolute freedom of its pen and paper. I think with a couple more writing staff we could expand the scope of what you can do but as lead and principal writer for dialogue etc alone, it means we do have to stay reigned in and not go too crazy with dialogue options. Writing branching paths for every conversation can expend a lot of time.
There's a lot more in the way of sidequests and stuff to do outside of just questing that we have plans for, things to break up the normal gameplay loops. There will be some instances where there is world permanence as well, as you can see already with the Crimson Dervish quest.
I'd love to give a more PNP experience but oof, I've worked on games before this one but this is the first time I've been a lead writer so I am not sure how we'd do it with our current resources. In my mind to do that we'd need 2 more writers and prooooo-ssabibly another artist on top of Arbuz and Hurfy. I'm just kind of thinking about those logistics. Plus an editor or at least a writer more on the permanent side of editing haha.
I will be editing a lot of the older stuff and such that goes through, but right now its more "push-push-push!"