Weird West's developers put the "immersive" in "immersive sim"

gamedeveloper.com:

Wolfeye Studios' Weird West is being made by a team of veterans who've long worked within the immersive simulation genre. It's a type of game infamous for enabling player choice, sometimes to the detriment of designers trying to make sure they still have a fun, coherent experience.

At GDC 2022, Weird West narrative designer Lucas Loredo discussed this particular problem, and offered some useful techniques for immersive sim developers to manage the multiple narrative ends that can emerge in this game genre.

Loredo's fundamental principle was that immersive sim narrative designers are trying to wrangle with a genre where the "verbs" that define gameplay can "hit" story elements. In Weird West, a player can befriend a local sheriff, they can also shoot the sheriff, they can also lure the sheriff into a fire tornado that they started, but in such a way that they are not directly responsible for the sheriff's death.

If the sheriff is a key path forward for Weird West's story, that presents a number of design challenges and branching ends to account for. Here's how Loredo broke down the tools that Wolfeye uses to wrangle and imagine all that content

Loredo broke the different tools for grappling with emergent story possibilities into four categories, ranking them by "difficulty," which he measured as how much design budget was needed to account for these possibilities. 

Skipping over the techniques that linear games use to advance the story (cutscenes or invincible non-playable characters), Loredo advanced into the "easiest" solutions designers can use to ensure that key story points are delivered to the players. 

The first of these solutions was to embed narrative story information in in-game objects. If your game doesn't let