So is railroad being restricted to ttrpg’s instead of say something like Expedition 33?
I think with present technology, all CRPGs are railroads.
My favorite CRPG is Mass Effect 1. And it's very much on rails. There is a bit of illusionism going on that becomes apparent the more times you repeat the game where you realize none of your choices really matter or significantly alter the events. All they do is change the dialogue that keeps you on the rails a very little bit, but it's still fundamentally the same outcome. You can do B, C, and D in any order, but B, C, and D don't alter depending on when you do them or based on prior actions, and they all lead to E which only becomes available when you have finished B, C, and D.
But that's because computers aren't currently creative and inventive. They can't respond by laying new rails or opening up new sandboxes. They can't cut doors in the wall to let you path differently through the story or environment. They can't invent dialogue to cope with unexpected actions. The best you can manage is hope the developers have accounted for every possibility available.
That might change in 20 or 25 years. We might have CRPGs that could fully deliver endless innovative dungeon crawling experiences on the level of what we were doing in say 1979, as good or better than 80% of the GMs out there. But right now, it's all railroads.
And that's not bad. Mass Effect is a work of art, beautifully conceived, directed, and implemented (except for the occasional wacky vehicle physics). Being a railroad isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's all about whether the ride is good, and whether you feel the rails as too confining. Sometimes in cRPGs you do get a bit forced into things where you wish you had other choices where the rails are a bit too obvious and the single solution is obnoxious.
