The lack of that is what I hate about these games.
The game is full of arbitrary limitations and full of mechanics designed to give everyone more or less exactly the same experience.
Unlike the prequel, you can not find out why you could not solve a puzzle in anyway besides the one convoluted solution that the devs decided. The puzzles usually requires zero deductive reasoning. Imitating something from a Looney Tunes cartoon is a puzzle in the same way hangman is a puzzle. In Maniac Mansion, they let you do the the thing and fail to see why that doesn't work.
It feels like someone wrote a game scenario for a visual novel but realized that he had a 3D engine in his thumb drive. You couldn't close doors unless you are standing on the right side of the door.
Emergent gameplay
Rimworld too.
While not at all the kind of emergent gameplay you are talking about well made ARMA 3 missions can be a self contained emergent experience.
I try to do this with my missions by offering the players several options while others will arise based on their actions due to the nature of the AI systems.
the same thing happened to me in AA2, i made a waifu to my specifications and a self insert, made her the class teacher and tried my FUCKING hardest to get in her pants. she was having none of it, and it wasn't because she refused to have sex with students, as she was fucking one of them and was like obsessed over him. so i beat him up every time i encountered him. eventually some other girl fell in love with me after talking to me a couple times, we fucked and she was DTF literally anywhere on school grounds. some fat fuck tried stealing her so i beat the shit out of him every time i saw him. that game is strangely fun as fuck and infuriating at the same time, pretty good porn game tbh
I don't think there's a single player game with as many options as SS13, just because pre-programmed NPCs will never be able to compare with the spontaneous nature of a live human player.
Hey, someone saved m story! I guess it was Natalya then, not Samus (but she was in the school as well).
The funny thing about that game is how it does a fairly good job at appearing somewhat non linear when actually you'll be doing mostly the same thing in every single playthrough. You look around and it looks like a maze you can get yourself lost in but after a while (and if you're not bad at videogames) you'll notice it's just one big corridor full or tiny nooks and crannys everywhere.
At least System Shock made it's areas like actual decks to explore around instead of simply connecting rooms with corridors in a linear fashion and call it a day.
It's a very divisive game, most grognards will love that shit but regular people will fucking hate it.
Most RPGs require that you optimize your build in order to progress in the game but they still give you some leeway in what you can spec into to mix up things, AoD has almost no leeway, you either specialize on a single thing according to your role or you're gonna suck at it lategame.
There are some exotic weird builds you can make but they require extensive meta knowledge about the game to know when a skill is gonna be required and how much of it is gonna be needed.
It gets to a point that several players save up on the stat points so they can allocate them according to the chalenges they meet up ahead.
Pre-programmed NPCs can still do a lot of neat stuff as long as the game has gameplay they can react to and use. Usually when NPCs suck at the game, either the devs are shit or the game itself ain't very good.
For instance, The Sims has a very nice story about the Chinman that's an amazing drama story with love, betrayal and a raging inferno. Some of it is input from the player but most is what the NPCs do that give it some purpose.
And ideally, that's what you want from a videogame to allow for emergent gameplay, that the game not only recognizes your actions but also reacts to them.
I hated the combat in Fallout and I didn't want to fight a whole floor of Hubologists so I wanted to kill AHS-9 silently. I wanted to kill him with TNT but my Steal skill was pretty low. I realized that I could just stuff all that TNT into that desk.
Robocraft had this when it first came out. Your playstyle was dictated not by your choice of weapons (there was only one type), but by how you built your robot. Small, slow floaters with a high tier, downwards pointing gun were called satellites for example. They raped everything on the ground, but were extremely vulnerable to regular enemy flyers. None of those mechanics were scripted.
Then the devs added a whole lot of bullshit to the game and now it's a boring clusterfuck where you are railroaded into a certain playstyle based on what you use to build your robot instead of how you build it.
F2 also had the Super Stimpack-assassinations you could do. I remember a friend of mine actually figuring that out on his own when the game came out.
Crysis had some pretty cool emergent gameplay too. Using strenght to throw explosive barrels with remote explosives on them to take down choppers probably wasn't intended. The wide variety of assault plans probably was, but is still cool. Just the amount of space the game had meant you could solve most missions in different ways, making you at least fel like you may have done things in a way that wasn't intended, or at least that not many people had figured out.
I locked doors to avoid having to deal with reinforcements and take pot shots at them from the fence. I used the Turn-based mode to sneak pass enemies. I realized that I could keep doors open by locking them while they are open.
I did something similar in FO:NV.
After remembering what so important about that cave, I eventually went back with Boone and ED-E to try that trick again.
Image 1 is what happen to the assassins.
The other images are proof of Deathclaw shack thing.
Is this the shit Rose has to do to make those wasteland omelets?