Seriously guys, we're limited by the technology. There's a reason CRPGs and JRPGs are what they are -- it's just not feasible to make the kind of experiences you are asking for. Consider Mass Effect or Dragon Age, games that have hundreds of thousands of pages of text. Even they feel "railroady" at times. You can't join the villain, after all, because they didn't have an extra 5 years to write, script, draw, program, etc that scenario and the 500 sub-scenarios involved.
That's the problem with modern games. They assume the player needs to be inundated with pages upon pages of mediocre fantasy guff to keep them engrossed in what is otherwise a plastic and unconvincing game world that has an economy entirely run on monster loot.
Make the game world logical if not realistic, fill it with NPCs that act like you would expect them to, and allow the PCs to act in meaningful ways with them. The players imagination can fill in the gaps and come up with a great story. Darklands might play like a multiple choice quiz at times, but it did this nearly two decades ago.