They just happen to occur within the same world. The player is still free to choose whatever action, he or she may choose during the course of the game, but even the game has to be designed such that there are several possible outcomes, or at the very least, designed with several possible actions to take, given the limitations of tech.

It shouldn’t be necessary to read the comic to understand the player’s story at all. Theoretically.

However your comic linked storyline seems to go against this. Having established a living environment you then constrain players to acting out limited option story paths. Consequences make immersion possible by giving ‘bad’ outcomes credibility. A fixed plot map makes developing the comic easier and it added a lot of flavour to Mafia Empire, but a fixed plot is still semi-linear.

An alternative quest story is to make the consequences fuzzy so that it is not possible to directly predict what will happen after any quest. Consider reputation and public opinion: failure at one job might ruin a captain’s reputation or it might take 100 failures for anyone to notice. This would require delinking the comic from the quest plot line and linking it to the world story.

Will there be branching quests where choosing to do one thing means you can’t do another, and will the quests you take influence which rare jobs you’re offered?