I think that kind of baggage does little more than trivialize the original adventure. Veterans will find it underwhelming, while newcomers find it pointless. It might be useful to those who lost their saves along the way, I guess. It might be different if video games weren't commercial products that care not to antagonize potential audiences.

In Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, I consider the Anarch ending the "true" ending, because thats what I'm always going for.

Just the most natural choice.

The first one. That's the one that I spent the most time in getting to and the one my (sometimes unwitting) choices led to. Anything after that comes from a quicker playthrough or load of a saved game and I'm not as invested in what that outcome is. It is just for the curiosity of what might've happened if I'd done things differently (which can still be interesting in its own right).

I'm of the opinion that, instead of blessing a single ending as "canon", developers should make multiple sequels that follow different endings, rather than just have a single canon for the series.

(Exceptions might include endings that could not possibly lead to further games, like those where there's no longer any conflict possible (like Wizardry 8's "write in book" ending), or those involving universal annihilation (Wizardry 8's BOFFO ending, or Undertale's genocide ending.)

You do realize that would very quickly become impractical and unfeasible? Not to mention it would quickly drive developers into bankruptcy. In a world where that was a realistic thing, the only way around it would be to make sure every game had only one possible ending.

How does actually taking into account what you did in the first game trivialize it? I'd think that ignoring it and assuming that it ended in a certain way is more likely to trivialize it.
(Don't get me started on the last part.)

It trivializes its existence as a game. Why bother with the ohgee when you can just simulate it in the sequel? It's mostly just a commercial feature. You could choose to think that, since the game did not acknowledge the specifics of your playthrough, nothing mattered. Or you could think that, since the game takes into account all outcomes and allows 'em to shape the future, everything mattered.

Oh, you were just referring to the simulation, not also actual save loading.
Well, it's required for people who haven't played the first game, or who didn't keep the save, or if it somehow is corrupted. If you allow loading but not simulating, you'll have a whole pile of people asking for saves for their desired ending / starting point.

At that point, I guess. But I see the whole concept as being trivializing. Not everyone is going to experience all the endings, but acknowledging them all would make every outcome worthwhile. Whatever one you got should reveal something about the circumstances of the future, but also whatever others you didn't. In this way, the original adventure still has something for the player to discover that could, potentially, enhance their understanding of the sequel in some way.

I think that's harder to find in games and easier of a conclusion to come to. I'm pretty sure it's because of the scale that makes each task harder to manage along a strict sense. Take for instance Fallout games, as you are familiar with as opposed to Bioshock which its sequel didn't follow through with the decisions made in the first game. Infinite even tried to emulate the same conditions instead of allowing players to have a different mindset altogether. As with fallout the endings matter mostly on the character you play as, very tabletop character-oriented writing which I quite prefer.

That's a very tall order, but admirable when pulled off.

Mass Effect sort of does this when starting each sequel. Though the particulars of the ending do not vary much. They all have same outcome, but slightly different circumstances about it.

The only game where I personally seen what you describe pulled off to full effect is The Suffering and its sequel, Ties that Bind. The first game has three endings, and the second game has three beginnings. You get the neutral one if you don't have a save from the first game. I think a handful of other games do this as well where they check the previous game's save, but that's a tiny fraction. That's a hell of a good way to handle it, but I can't imagine that being doable with games of any serious variation.

In all of this, I think I can see why developers typically avoid these sorts of situations.

I'm only saying conflicts should be handled to make the sequel itself internally consistent. Also, I was not thinking of anything in particular when I made the commentary. The point was developers should not allow what they did in the past to limit what they can do in the present or the future. So I'm arguing, however poorly, against what you described. Having however many beginnings to accommodate however many endings seems to me like a colossal waste of time and resources.

Wizardry 7 and 8 do take the "multiple beginnings" approach. You import your save from the previous game, and depending on which ending you received, you will end up with a different beginning. (Wizardry 7 does have one ending that won't import into 8, but that one is pretty obvious, as it's a bad ending that has you floating in space.)

Not enough games let you import from the previous game. I would rather buy smaller versions of the sequels running on the same engine as Half Life 2 did than an entire game. Wizardry sounds cool though.