Players are deathly afraid of one thing, more than anything else and that is making a permanent mistake. In real life we all know how easy it is done. I recently have manged to fabricate 3 of them in what is for me a very short period of time. Hindsight is always better of course, but we rationalize in reverse too. I could have seen each of those three mistakes clearly before making them. I could have avoided them, by avoiding the subject, thinking it over more, collecting more information and so on. But at the time, well, it seemed the right thing to do.
Now a player works exactly the same way. They think about it, agonize over it even, to the point where they block themselves from enjoying the game. It often starts at the beginning, by choosing a race, gender, class, starting location, profession, faction, heritage and many other things that might be rather important. Or not.
In many fantasy games you get to pick a class and/or race, which determine your effectiveness in one thing or another. It will feel unfair when the dwarf blacksmith can do better than the human or elven one can. Even if lore says, the dwarfs breath, eat and defaecate metal,the player still will feel chipped. He should have started as a dwarf if he wanted to be a really good blacksmith, the game tells him.
Fifteen years ago we could, as an industry, get away with that. It still wasn't very nice for te players, but they didn't know anything better. Today they do. In some ways.
Today games handle this by changing your specs on the fly (usually with some wait time in between, or go to place X to change. Now I write code a lot during my day, then change into cleaning mode, home improvement mode and shopping mode, without really changing myself. In a single day I replaced a floor, installed a brand new computer and counseled a couple, not so long ago. So my role has changed drastically throughout the day, but I did two of those things at the same place and the switch was instant.
The expectation today is something similar to that. Players can live with game limitations, but why can't we make it work without them?
We can. But it ruins some of the golden gooses and requires actual innovation. Then again, not as much innovation as one might think.
The key to this problem lies in the power progression. Today you start as warrior level 1 and once you reach level 100 you are done. Then starts the end game and you start to hunt down artifacts which get exchanged for a better one every 6 months to keep you running in that treadmill. You can level up a wizard and get another perspective on the game, but it will highlight more what's the same than what is different. And you have just split your own game in two, by having two characters.
This is no small thing. People you meet in the game often identify you with a specific character. They will think of you as that character and address you as such, even in voice chats. Now what do you do with someone who plays regularly two characters? I once was in a voice chat and first needed about ten minutes to figure out who was who, because they all used a different nick in the voice chat than in the game we were all playing. It kept being confusing for weeks. In short, it's self fracturing. And fracturing is in most cases bad. When I say fracturing I don't mean opposition. I mean taking something that could be one and break it up because of technical restrictions, easier handling and so on, for the developer and game runner, instead of making it easier by keeping it whole for the player.
So you don't want multiple characters really. And some modern games, in the end, one character can fit all the "roles" that are out there anyways in some way or another. But yes there are ways to do it better.
If you have the choice to do one thing today and then go down an entirely different path of learning a different thing, without fearing of losing your old progress, you are likely to give it a try at one point. If you have to restart from the newbish ways of your first character to the really interesting bits, that will keep you from doing it very effectively.
And of course, if while you play you have to make a decision, do I go A or B without the possibility to go and take the other route as well, this will cause people to panic.
That being said, there are ways that you can have permanent choices that are meaningful. They have to be voluntary. Players have to know what they get into before they make the choice, they have to be able to revert it in the beginning, with a grace period before it gets permanent. After having made a conscious and well informed choice, they feel wonderful about it. If they are presented with an instant "choose now or suffer" way, it won't work as well.
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