Ok here's how I think it should be done. A story as it is should behave like an AI, it assessed your actions and then evolves the plot into the appropriate direction, so that if you're like an evil dude different things will happen and ur goal will change, the quests will change and so on. Like the world is the same (same characters and same locations), but if you do a certain thing it evolves the world, the world is what u make it. Its kind of hard to explain, I guess what I mean is that instead of just preset quests there should be a begining and a bunch of locales in the story to which it can then be linked, so it can web out into thousands of different locations, like going from one to the other and so on, branch out, and the further u get the further u move away from where u could have ended up if you chose something different at the begining.
So this becomes as follows, instead of having a path and having to chose between being good or evil on this path you have this series of locales to which u can be linked if you chose or do one thing over another, and so the story progresses this way which may lead to a multitude of different endings. This way you have a story and a world that is trully affected by your choices and action, it evolves as u progress.
Ofcourse u can not have as many actual locations with such a setup, the more locations the more complicated the story becomes, the more work has to be put into it, up to a point where it becomes impossible to make. I myself am going to experiment with 1-3 locations with a SinglePplayer version of this ut2k3 mod called ShatteredOasis (I'm the leaders on the mod) and see how it works out, to make the game more involved, but only inward instead of location wise. although walking around the same map all the time can never be fun for long. but don't go out spreading rumors just yet, all in good time.
So this becomes as follows, instead of having a path and having to chose between being good or evil on this path you have this series of locales to which u can be linked if you chose or do one thing over another, and so the story progresses this way which may lead to a multitude of different endings. This way you have a story and a world that is trully affected by your choices and action, it evolves as u progress.
Ofcourse u can not have as many actual locations with such a setup, the more locations the more complicated the story becomes, the more work has to be put into it, up to a point where it becomes impossible to make. I myself am going to experiment with 1-3 locations with a SinglePplayer version of this ut2k3 mod called ShatteredOasis (I'm the leaders on the mod) and see how it works out, to make the game more involved, but only inward instead of location wise. although walking around the same map all the time can never be fun for long. but don't go out spreading rumors just yet, all in good time.