Yeah, its how you get more choices, by actually not placating everyone and not doing everything for them. If you play it like you expect these games to work, it railroads you. It actually treats doing and not doing things in gameplay as choices, instead of just dialog choices. Choosing to attack and kill some hostile rando NPCs that seem like rando fodder can actually turn out to change the story, and you'd not realize if you went around them things would unfold different, because we're so used to being given some dialog wheel paragon/renegade thing to determine all choices. We're used to "not siding with someone" being saying "No." in dialog, rather than just... not doing their quest, and then later in the main story the quest gets marked as failed and THEN they treat you like you declined them. You do get some typical dialog select choices though. There's massive changing of the main story and branching based on not doing sidequests and having low rep with certain factions. You can end up dicking around doing fetch quests for too long like Hinterlands in Inquisition, but I highly recommend only doing quests for people you like and agree with, and then progressing the main story.
Basically the game is a series of chapters or acts, and each time you progress and that timeframe of sidequests go away, the consequences of what you did, how you did it, and what you didn't do, all happen, changing the next chapter/act, similar to Vampyr.
The story also shows ways all sides are both right and wrong, instead of just "Colonials Evil; Natives Pure".
Also, there's a lot of interesting and varied ways to solve problems and quests, that you're never actually presented with. For example, often you're not told you can sneak around instead of fighting your way in, but if you do, the story will actually acknowledge it. But there's also stuff like choosing to go talk to an NPC and tattle on questgivers and stuff, but the game doesn't mark and tell you about all the options you really have, so its easy to go through your first playthrough and think you don't have options, when really you just don't realize how much your choices in gameplay are affecting things. Also, not always getting immediate reactions, but then a couple chapters later is when some NPCs react and consequences happen.
