[CobrastanJorji]

There's a fascinating trade-off there.

Diablo (and much more so its sequels) was focused pretty hard on replayability. After beating the game once, the player is encouraged to play the again with the same character, continuing to level it up. Keeping some content back for those later playthroughs is a way to make the second or third trip through more interesting. The very nature of the randomly generated levels is a big part of this.

Games like Witcher 3 or Skyrim, on the other hand, are focused on one single, giant play session, chock full of content. You should be able to do nearly everything (except perhaps choosing a build) the first time. The exceptions are choices in particular quests, which need to have different results so that the players have a feeling of agency.

[nottorp]

Funny because Witcher 2 had the audacity to have a completely different chapter 2 (like 1/3 of the game) based on a choice at the end of chapter 1.

To the point that you need to play chapter 2 twice to get the whole story.

Then Witcher 3 went more mainstream.

[lloeki]

My memory is very blurry about it but IIRC in Skyrim you can reset your build with a spell or something, and even change class with a side quest (possibly even appearance, or even race, but that one may have been a mod), so you can really do everything in one playthrough with one character (Ship of Theseus notwithstanding)

IIRC a couple of quests had branches that were mutually exclusive on some conditions though (mostly either you get reward A xor B)