There is alot of text here so I am going to sumarize it to help myself with replying, and maybe it will also help you see whether or not I have misunderstood anything.
1 You think player choice is a particular thing, and not just the player having choices.
What you consider player choice translates into different endings, specifically story.
2 You think gating content is a good thing. If there is potentially unappealing content in a game, you would rather the game keeps it from you in advance.
4 Your dod waifu is trash.
5 You think that my issues are inherently with grinding and poor pacing, and not with what you consider player choice. Catering to my wishes could even hurt the industry, in limiting the creative process of the developers.
As is aparent from my writing, I am not a native english speaker. So if player choice has a specific meaning other than the two words, player and choice, I am not aware of this.
Thinking player choice can only be translated into rpgs and straight up you selecting between 3 paths in a dialogue to decide the narrative outcome of a quest or the end game credits is very limited thinking.
If a game gives you choices, it may as well be with what weapon or operator you are going to attack with in Rainbow Six Seige. The gameplay is vastly different depending on your choice of operator or weapon. What faction to play in heroes of might and magic, or how to spend your resources. Far Cry 2 had a limited amount of diamonds, this is limiting your playstyle too, thus creating choices.
If are still with me, and willing to consider player choice being choices in actual gameplay, you will find more sense in my Ubisoft / radiant quest comparison. The ubisoft sandbox model is indeed player choice, and it is so at the cost of greater narrative. You've been given a self-assembly kit to have fun with, to be used in no particular order. There is no structure, and you have the choice of how to play to have the kind of fun you want.
When I angrily professed it barely belonged in a game, I was obviously not talking about ALL choice, gaming is inherently interactive, thus differentiating from a movie. I was talking about the above mentioned choice. the one that comes at the cost of story.
This is my private opinion. But I hold the creativity of developers or storytellers in high regard. I am interested in hearing their story. I am not very much interested in hearing my own. Doing radiant quests in skyrim is not as great a story as commander Shepard defeating Saran and saving the citadel from the reapers. The fact that the mass effect story is so much more epic than the skyrim one, is very much because of the player's limited input, not influencing the creator's vision. Andromeda is basically the sandbox / radiant quest / ubisoft / version of mass effect.
Throughout everything I wrote in my original post, I was writing under the impression that selecting routes were always bad, because it limited the amount of content I could see in a single play through. You bring up an excellent point, that some people might actually want to cut content. Thus replaying would never be an issue, because they would never want to play through babysitters allowing Christine to get intercoursed by a penis that we are told in dialogue is not the one of the main character.
This does however, mix poorly with my above goal, to experience the game as envisioned by the creator. An options menu to simply censor or remove NTR would be more my taste (if I was actually interested in censoring) Every game doesn't need to include every single fetish, and it also shouldn't limit itself because some fetish is too far out for some.
For some people watching a black penis is a huge deal. Should DoD have a route to turn Marcus white?
Obviously not. Lewdlab had a vision when designing the character, he is meant to be the token black guy, and the main character's bro. While not necessarily the largest part of the story, a version where the character
is different, is still a different story. Now imagine if this fictive race sensitive version of DoD had sexual content only available to this version, but not nesesarily relating to anything of race. Lets say something as simple as a missionary sex position with Alice where the cumshot isn't rotated so the penis is on the top of the screen instead of the bottom (That camera angle really bothered me). Replaying the game just to achieve this would be a chore, but it is still something that more people would care about than the race issue.
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Lastly, I understand what you are saying here perfectly. The developer is making something, and he shouldn't change it because of my issues. As you can gather from above, I obviously agree with you. But, I am not entirely convinced it is not the other way around. As I see it, it is just as likely that games have several routes, to cater to more people at once, and thus possibly hurting the process. Big brother is a great example of a game with a clear vision, being limited, regulated and drastically changed to fit a massive audience. Darksilver clearly lost his vision along the road, because he had to think of the audience and not his own story.
