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maybe a way to fix dialogue choices in games: use generic "emotion i want to convey in my dialogue choice" but expand it and actually construct sentences. to keep it from railroading the player into a handful of specific choices, have the player's choices be the same throughout the game, and let them pick the choices in real-time.
for example, if you need directions to a place, you can select "tell me more about", and [the place]. you would be able to set various nouns to buttons, similar to equipping items in zelda or whatever else, so you would only need 4 or 5 nouns for any particular quest. each noun is important enough to interact with any of the static verbs, so the player would always know what they can or can not say, and what each dialogue choice does (avoid all [glass him] scenarios)

to keep it from sounding like dumb video game dialogue, have a small-talk mechanic, where you need to butter people up to get them talking about deep shit or give you a quest. compare it to Oblivion's disposition minigame, but it's through normal dialogue mechanics. so you can start off conversation with asking about the weather, or you could ask specifically about some plot event, like a disaster or political news. you could insult or intimidate them with modifiers to the chosen verb, giving you a good cop/bad cop choice for literally any interaction

the only way i could see this truly working well is in a game that only relies on dialogue to get exposition to the player, and not by using dialogue for finishing quests. if they already know what to do, you should let them do it instead of listen to some guy talk at you. dialogue should supplement gameplay, not consist of it

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