Guild Wars 2

I think Personal Story beginning from character creation up to the death of Zhaitan can be retrofitted to still maintain its “decisions are important and impact the story many ‘episodes’ down the road,” while gaining the replay-ability of being able to make different choices and go down different paths.

The simple way to do this, is to make the choices that only impact the next chosen instance within the ‘episode’, such as ‘which of the two/three instances do you want to do next?’, open to allow us to make different choices each time we replay, while making choices that impact future episodes, such as ‘which order do you want to join?’ locked after the first pick. This could be done by permanently blurring out the other selections, or just skipping the selection phase all together.

Also this idea could be expanded upon future living story episodes and expansions. For there to be a mix of replay-able choices that only impact the episode and thus can be reselected for a different rout/experience, and permanent choices that can only be made once, to still give the story that over arching depth and customization.

Though, I can see how it would be hard to write so many different branches for future content, so even if going forward, the system of permanent choices and replay-able choices will not work, it could still work for the current personal story content, and thus make it replay-able.