Multiple paths are always fun. Of course, they also make the game more complicated, which can cause problems if we're not careful. But, yeah, it's certainly something to consider when we go through and detail each scene.

Well, what I meant was, developing for multiple storylines is significantly more difficult than developing for a single storyline. You have to make sure that each path is equal in terms of character growth and consistent in how it affects the rest of the game. Typically, the whole point of multiple storylines is that they are not so consistent.

In all likelihood, the more separate paths we allow the player to take, the less interesting and cohesive the story will be as a whole. If we don't know for sure what the player has done earlier in the game, it's hard to build on those events later. Think about the second half of Final Fantasy 6. In their attempt to create a "non-linear" story, all they really ended up with was a bunch of disconnected events which you could play in whatever order you wanted. I really felt the story was lacking in that part of the game. I'd rather not do that with Fate of Io.

Non-linear storylines have been sort of the "holy grail" of RPG's for a long time, with the players constantly asking for them and the developers constantly not seeing any good way to do them. When non-linear stories are implemented, the players end up not liking it as much as they thought they would, because it never occurred to the players that the overall story would be hurt by non-linearity.

Little bits of non-linearity can work if we are careful about them, but even then it can be difficult. As it is, we already have a story outline, and adding non-linearity to an existing outline is even worse... so I think we should just stick with what we have.