Well one way around it, is don’t label any of the endings in the story as epilogues and it won’t be “linear.” It’ll just a be a story with a bunch of endings with some of them better than others.
I sort of have a slightly different mindset on what constitutes a linear story than most probably, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever really addressed it here since it doesn’t seem to matter as much (to the regular forum members at least, driveby guest subhumans opinions don’t matter) I’ve addressed it on CoG since there’s been more bitching about it amongst themselves on there.
Anyway, here’s the long winded explanation.
As far as I’m concerned if the story is branching with some sort of major difference due to choice, then it isn’t linear.
If one of the choices leads to death and the other doesn’t, it’s still not linear, since the choice still had a consequence. A severe one, but it was still major.
Now one could say this is “railroading” and I can see that point of view, however there are a shitload of CYOAs that railroad with the “illusion of choice” by just changing up a bit of dialogue/description and it still ultimately leads you to the same following events. Personally I’m not fond of doing this. If anything I find it more dishonest than killing the protagonist every other page.
Bioware is infamous for doing this ALL the time and Bethesda did it to a pretty damn horrible degree in Fallout 4.
I’ll give an example of what I mean.
Play as any of the origin characters in the first Dragon Age and eventually you meet Duncan and he asks you to be a Gray Warden. In most cases your character is in a horrible situation, so you’d be wise to accept regardless of what you think of them.
Okay, makes sense. So why the hell are you even given the option to decline Duncan if he’s just going to conscript you anyway?
IF you’re going to give the choice to decline, then there should at least be a proper outcome for it, EVEN if it means death. If anything, it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting, if when you declined Duncan’s offer, he said “Okay, see you.” and then your character faced whatever came next as a non-warden.
The dwarf and elf commoners probably would have gotten executed. They could have had a whole little scene where your character goes before the executioner’s axe.
The dwarf noble could have continued on in endless tunnels fighting unlimited darkspawn until he gets killed. (Might have been fun to see how long you could last) The human noble probably would have had something similar with Howe’s men.
The wizard probably could have had the longest “non-warden” path depending on if he helped the bloodmage or not. If he did, he could have gotten lobotomized. If he didn’t, there could have been a whole mini-path where you’re directly fighting the demon invasion of the tower. You’d be doomed either way of course, either getting turned into an abomination or getting killed by a demon.
My point is, while all of those lead to death due to “choosing wrong” it still would have been a lot more interesting than Duncan just conscripting you and moving on to next scene. And better yet, there would have been a definite consequence of picking the wrong choice.
To me, dead end choices (death or not) are preferable to fake choices that give the illusion and railroad the story anyway.
Now I already know that I’m probably a dinosaur with this train of thought since back in the old days, death was around the corner all the damn time in adventure games and interactive fiction so I really don’t see the big deal of killing people off.
And yeah, I get that people don’t like to die nowadays and start all over, but really, you don’t even need to worry about starting all over since you can easily just click back page and pick the other choice.
Also this isn’t to say I’m completely against the whole fake choice thing, sometimes it’s inevitable. One or two isn’t going to bother me, especially when they’re spaced out, but I do tend to get annoyed when the whole game consists of them.
To give a better perspective of what probably influenced me, the first CYOA type books I got into weren’t the original CYOA books or even the old Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf books, it was a lesser known series called “Be an Interplanetary Spy!”
Virtually EVERY choice in those books was limited to 2 (though sometimes 3 or 4) and you had a puzzle you had to solve. Pick the wrong choice and you died. (99% of the time) There was usually only ever one correct choice and the times where they went easy on you and it just said something like “It took you longer than you thought to fix the engines” I actually felt cheated that I didn’t get killed for picking the wrong answer.
It helped of course that they had a lot cool death scenes (Every page of the Spy books were fully illustrated)
So to answer your question, if I cut off all the other major branches in Eternal and only had Eternal Harbinger as the epilogue, would it be linear?
To me, no it wouldn’t since I did that already with Death Song and Necromancer and I don’t consider those linear either. Everyone else, well they can think what they want obviously.
And in any case I’ve always said whatever ending you got and you liked the best, then go ahead consider that one to be “the true ending” if it makes you happy. Some people have liked where the Necro gives up world genocide and just lives quietly with Catalina for example and personally I like the unofficial “Eternal Bliss” epilogue the best where the Eternal winds up with Alison in the afterlife.