I never got into the fighting fantasy style of branching story game books, but then I discovered the Fabled Lands series by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson. They'

I never got into the fighting fantasy style of branching story game books, but then I discovered the Fabled Lands series by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson. They're essentially open world game books, you can roam freely from location to location over most of the geography, with local branching adventures. Each book covers one region or kingdom. They also use a system of code words that set flags that enable quests that involve multiple locations, and changes to the world and events, so if you visit a location eventually you might trigger a change that means you go to a different version of that location that reflects your changes. It’s a very different experience, to me anyway.