You can have a narrative where you play an important part where you don't decide literally everything about every faction/race/religious affiliation etc etc.
Exactly, I agree! I'm fine with choices, but they need some level of restraint to avoid having again- a clusterfuck.
And you can have the level of choice that impacts you in a broad and personal sense without making the game a muddied mess.
Bioware has a tendency of writing itself into a corner with it's bigger RPG's. I really hope they don't end up doing it again for the second ME trilogy (there's gonna be 3, producers loooooooooooove trilogies)
Both ME1 and the DA trilogy do this well. For all the problems the DA series may have, it handles the choices you make very well on a personal level. Watching
Alistair/ Loghain assert how your DAO Warden can't be trusted if they did the ritual is a good example.
But wasn't that one of the hooks of the series? It was designed to be a trilogy from the start iirc. The whole, "you make your choices and play out the trilogy the way you want" is what I loved about it. A true RPG, not just stats and grinding. When I capped Mordin in ME3 and told my buddy about it, he was in disbelief because his experience was the complete opposite! I would hope they would continue this trend. People have been saying that it's Mass Effect in name only because it's in another galaxy or whatever..... To me, what makes Mass Effect "Mass Effect" is the ability to customize your own experience to how you see fit, in a future sci fi universe.
That being said, it must be a nightmare for Bioware. Hopefully they learned how to do it easier this time.
They let you make choices but didn't think about how it could affect the main story arc, or the universe in future installments. Choices that affect you as a player and the world can be good, but they aren't inherently good.