Branching Narrative

Branching Narrative describes a story built as an authored tree or graph of choice points, where a person wrote every reachable path in advance even though any single player will only ever see one route through it. Mass Effect's paragon/renegade axis and most visual novels are the familiar shape; Disco Elysium runs the same idea through skill checks rather than dialogue-wheel prompts, gating entire branches behind a character build the player assembled earlier, which makes its branches feel earned by preparation rather than chosen on the spot.

The genre's defining constraint is combinatorial: a story that branches meaningfully at every choice and never reconverges explodes past what any writing team can author within a shipping budget after only a handful of decision points. Most branching narratives solve this by funneling — presenting a choice that feels consequential in the moment but reconverging the plot onto the same handful of beats shortly after, an approach Telltale's output was frequently, and fairly, criticized for. The choice was real as an interaction; it was often not real as a fork.

This is worth separating from Multiple Endings, which concerns only a story's terminal states. A game can branch heavily through its middle and still land on one of only two or three endings, or it can be almost entirely linear and fork only in its final act, producing several distinct endings without ever being a "branching narrative" in the structural sense — the two properties are independent, and a lot of confusion in discussing a given game's choices comes from treating "it has multiple endings" as proof that it branches throughout, when the branching, if any, might be concentrated entirely at the very end.

It's also distinct from Procedural Narrative: every branch here was written by a person, where a procedural system's outputs have no individual author behind them at all.