Don’t get me going on Solitaire … it’s like they didn’t even attempt a plot.
IIRC, The fake London is in a big cavern under the real London. When you travel from one to the other via the shop, it’s not a time machine but some sort of elevator. The giant robot at the end breaks through the ceiling of the fake London, tearing a hole in the center of the real London above. And I mispoke about one point; I said “Flora” but I meant Claire, the Profesor’s girlfriend, who goes back in time to her death at the end.
That’s pretty much a trope of the RPG genre, though. You’re the Big Damn Hero and people want you to go find their cat and do their shopping and stuff, and delaying doesn’t matter until it does.
Mass Effect 2 has near-requirements that you dawdle until one incident where you better not.
[spoiler]You are with a nearly all-new crew, and everyone has reasons to mistrust you. Your old teammates like Garrus and Tali worry you might be controlled by Cerberus somehow. Your new teammates don’t know what your motives are. So you’d best deal with their loyalty missions or else they might not live through your near-suicide mission at the end - and if they don’t, you might not, either.
However, once the Collectors storm the Normandy and kidnap everyone but Joker, you’d better head out ASAP to rescue them, because this time, timing matters. If I recall a write-up on this: do one mission first and Kelly Chambers dies painfully in front of your eyes. Do more and you lose all of the non-combatants except for Dr. Chakwas, who rips into you afterwards for fucking around instead of saving them.
That’s one thing I don’t like about the Genesis 2 interactive background DLC for ME3 - one of the choices is “Collectors kidnap everyone: upgrade Normandy fully first or rush off to rescue the crew immediately?” Depending on how you played ME2, this might not have been a problem for you. I fully upgraded the Normandy, did all the loyalty missions, and chose correctly for mission assignments, so I didn’t lose anyone.[/spoiler]
In Mass Effect 1, I could run through the main story from beginning to end without doing anything that felt particularly unnecessary to me. Likewise for Dragon Age 1 (but not Dragon Age 2!). And likewise for Knights of the Old Republic 1 (I haven’t played KOTOR 2).
At least Dragon Age lampshades it. Regularly. Morrigan Disapproves.
Actually, you get one mission, exactly. Just enough to do Leigon’s loyalty mission IIRC.
Yeah, I was partly joking by mentioning Tetris, but there’s a real point buried in there, too. If a game has no story at all, like Tetris, nobody has any problem with it. Usually, if a game has only a thin veneer of a story, that gets a pass, too. And obviously, if a game has an extensive, detailed story, everyone loves that. But there seems to be a sort of uncanny valley where a game has some story but not enough, and those get hated. Sometimes, too, you’ll see a game that’s right on the edge of that precipice, leading people to vehemently disagree about it: Those who perceive it as having just a little less story than that threshold enjoy it, while those who perceive it as having just a little more dislike it.
Sort of like graphics. People seem willing to embrace 8-bit retro stuff and you’ll find an audience for cutting edge stuff easily but no one wants to play a game that looks like it was 3D modeled on a Playstation (original).