They did indeed take a big risk. I've long thought about the cost/benefit of non-linearity in story based games vs the mutli-path route of an open-ended game. In the former, I'm forced to replay content to get to the new stuff; in the latter, I pick and choose the path I want. Quite frankly, the bigger and more open a game is, the more non-linear it is imo. I've always felt the 'choose your own adventure' path has serious perils from a game design standpoint. One more thing. The reason I replayed TW1 as many times as I did, was due to it's complexity and depth, not it's famed non-linearity. In fact, the story was so well written, the C&C so convincing, that in my 7 or 8 runs ( some incomplete) I rarely ventured from the same moral decisions. I found it hard to do so. But I was always picking up minutia I had missed in subsequent playthroughs.