What games actually have choice affect the game or story?

Most games seem to have the illusion of choice. Im wondering if you think there are any that do it well? For me i think Dragon age origins did it the best having lots of different outcomes and affects.

Heavy Rain, Dishonored and L.A. Noir come to mind, the first time playing Heavy Rain was pretty extreme when it came to trying to make up your mind before the game progressed further. Fallout 3 gave some pretty interesting choices which felt like they did impact the game world. I think Bioshock did too but it never felt as urgent.

In terms of affecting the story, Witcher is probably the best, with branching paths in the plot, because of your choices, and the fact that the way you dealt with a character comes to play some time after you made your choice, with the character helping you, or maybe not, because he's dead, as you killed him.

Another good example is Planescape Torment, where entire plots only open because you chose to, or you pass them by, and you chose a lot of times the way you deal with the foes you face, even at the end.

A younger game that also included choice, and was awesome in its implementation is Alpha Protocol. There your choices affect the outcomes in the missions and outside of it.

Kotor

The Witcher and Mass Effect.

GTAV, Mass Effect 1-2

Wasteland 2!

Alpha Protocol is probably the game when it comes to this. No other game comes even close to making your choices, even the small ones that you don't realize are important at the time, come back to change things dramatically later on.

Ultima 4 is the best example that comes to mind, as you essentially play as the world's messiah and have to inspire your followers by setting examples within nine virtues.

Dragon age Origins and The Witcher 2.

80 Days

Any Black Isle game qualifies. Planescape: Torment first among them, Baldur's Gate 2 has plenty of player agency, and the Icewind Dale series does as well.

Bioware/Obsidian games tend to do a fairly good job of replicating that feeling. Only game I can think of that blew my expectations way out of the water was The Witcher 2.

The Witcher 2 is the best example I can think of, since there are two very different paths depending on your choice in the first act (both with different characters and everything, it's great), and there are a lot of smaller things that come back in the end as well.

Mass Effect (1, 2, and 3) sort of. It's not like The Witcher 2 where the story takes a drastic turn depending on your choices, since all of the story beats are exactly the same regardless of your actions, but it's great to have the small things you've done between games be acknowledged.

I'll point out a couple that haven't been yet but Persona 4 and Spec Ops

I second Alpha Protocol. The conversations and what information you find can actually influence events later in the game, something that is only really promised by other games.

Mass Effect series except for the ending

Wait, what choices do you actually have in Spec Ops? I don't remember any meaningful ones.

Or Persona 4 for that matter. I mean, you can choose between the good and true endings I guess (and I bet most people get the good ending simply because they don't even know that there's a true ending), but typically if you get the bad ending, it's because you didn't know what were the right answers to six prompts that show up near the end of the game.

Mass Effect gave you the illusion of mattering.

but in the end how things played out were insignificant. most if not all played out as a change in a single line of dialog or if someone was standing in a cutscene.

Consortium is short and cliff hangers the shit out of you but is packed with choices.
The original Fallouts are pretty good at it as well.

I'll third Alpha Protocol as well, hell, there is even a difficulty mode that changes dialogue that changes gameplay.

For whatever its faults may be, Alpha Protocol's reactivity to player choice is incredibly impressive.

Funny you bring this up. I was just playing Tales of Borderlands for the first time yesterday and it struck me how the game starts with a "your choices affect the story" prompt at the start of the game. I get that they put it in to create the illusion that your choices matter (just like a movie would say "based on a true story" to create an illusion of realism/importance), but it just waved a big red flag for me and broke the illusion completely.

It makes me wonder if you actually want branching story in linear story-driven games. The games I can think of where branching storylines have actually made the game more interesting for me are much more open-ended games. It's just much more interesting when you end up doing someting completely different, rather than playing through the same linear thing over again with a few different cutscenes etc.

I second Wasteland, Witcher and Alpha Protocol as well as the Infinity Engine games and add to the discussion Deus Ex. The choices you have in that game in regards to gameplay impact are unparraleled.

Love this criticism, as if whether an entire sentient race exists or dies only becomes relevant if you get a big space macguffin afterwards.

Witcher 2 is the king in the modern era. Vandal Hearts 2 has some crazy ass shit depending on how you go through the game.

Alpha Protocol is interesting but it's still more or less following a blueprint a la Bioware, you don't actually change the levels you go through or anything just who happens to be there and why.

Just remembered

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together

Minecraft

For any of its other flaws, Alpha Protocol was a masterful success when it came to developing a story that was cinematic yet allowed you real meaningful influence upon it. The Telltale games at this point are a complete pose on the branching, they just tell a story with dialogue options. There are entire levels you don't go to, or can experience quite differently depending on your allies or how much information you've gathered about some of your contacts, or even just your relationship with them. I think it gets a boost because story and gameplay are united extremely well; when you get your end-of-mission report and see the list of all the things it recorded about your play, Jeff described it as 'almost showing off' and I agree.

Nowadays, Life is Strange. It is an episodic game built around player choice. Although it does present absense of choice is some crucial moments, which is kinda sad, but understandable given the smaller budget.

I finished The Witcher 2 not too long ago and, after reading about all of the other ways that story could have gone, I'd say that it's still the best. I haven't played Alpha Protocol so maybe it's as good or better.

I mentioned Mass Effect in this thread a long time ago. While it is impressive, the story isn't really varied, which is the big problem with choices in games. You make choices, but ultimately things get to the same outcome and largely by the same devices. All of The Witcher 2's story variations can be compared, but at the end of the game, the world isn't necessarily the same in everyone's playthrough, and it's because of choices you made throughout the game and not because of some arbitrary "All right, you made it, now pick your ending" machine like Mass Effect and Deus Ex HR.

Witcher 2 cuts of FULLY 1/3 of the gameplay areas/characters to you depending on your choice. So THAT'S a big-un. First Witcher also does it up right, choice-wise, though it's also more subtle about it.

Mass Effect 2 and 3 certainly does a good job (particularly with the DLC of the latter) and Dragon Age: Origin bombards you with a WHOLE lotta decisions that matter in the final act.

Games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate and KOTOR FEEL like they matter, but they really don't, partially owing to the binary "You're either the greatest person to ever live or the absolute WORST" nature of the choices. If there's any one that's forgotten, it's Alpha Protocol. That game really made it feel like your choices matter moment to moment, and having beaten it three times (that's right...that's right), they DO in small terms.

All of them. If you choose to turn off your console, it affects the game.

Quickly scanned this but didn't see Wolf Among Us, what's wrong with you people. Handled choice better than walking dead and many other games

There is this one game out now, somethin about witches I dunno. Check it out

While that is true for Fallout 3, Fallout 1 and 2 had a lot of granularity in their choices, and they had noticeable impact on the interactions with and between NPC's in the world.

Games that properly let player choice change the game and the end for real without binary "kiss the baby / MURDER THE BABY, ITS PARENTS, EVERYBODY NEAR, NUKE THE COUNTRY, THEN THE PLANET, SNUFF THE SUN IN THE SYSTEM, EXPAND THE BLACK HOLE AT THE CORE OF THE GALAXY" B-developer bullshit need a wiki entry.

The Witcher 2 did something kind of insane, by effectively giving you a different story for the rest of the game because of who you side with at the end of the first act. There are characters, quests, and storylines you'll miss out on entirely by choosing one. I was kind of blown away by how much they had divided things when I replayed the game. It's a really ballsy move, too, because you have to assume that the majority of people who play the game will only see one side of that.

Alpha Protocol was pretty good about having your decisions impact the story, as well.

Silent Hill 2

I'm going to respectfully disagree. I felt Fallouts 1 and 2 DID give a lot of great consequence to your choices, but they still boiled down to:
"I will find your daughter, and don't worry about a reward."
"I will find your daughter, but there'd better be something in it for ME." and

"I MURDERED HER AND I MURDER YOU CAUSE I'M EEEEEEEEEEEEVIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIL!!!"

I was going to say Witcher 2. Problem with Bioware games (and its only a problem because they're espousing the idea of "choice with consequence") is they'd like for you to get to do almost everything in one playthrough. So you've got all these choices that seem like they should divert the plot in a significant way but they always bottleneck back to the same plotline, so that everyone can experience most of the game. Witcher 2 has large segments of the game you'll never see based on the choices you make chapter to chapter.

If we're being really serious about this though, the answer is Way of the Samurai. A playthrough will average between a half hour and an hour but you get something like 30 different ways to finish the game. If you really want to play a game with consequences and arent just using hot buzzwords, its untennable for the length of the game to be more than an hour.

Otherwise you're dealing with a game that treats your consequences mattering like you get a couple diverging lines of dialog that always starts and ends more or less the same. The kind of game where you save before the last level, get the good ending, then reload the save and make one of the other choices and get the other endings, because every choice before the big choice at the end actually didnt matter, turns out (Dragon Age 2). Like Deus Ex was almost a parody of "choices matter" with how it wrapped up because it was afraid to lock anyone out of content.

I don't believe a game is giving you consequence, necessarily, just because you have the ability to kill anyone in the game. In most older games that did it (and honestly, the new ones too), it just broke the main quest line and you couldn't finish the game. That's not a consequence really. It would be a consequence if I wiped out a faction of my own volition, not part of some rival quest I just decided I didnt like their outfits and killed them all, and the consequence was a rival gang taking over that territory, or perhaps 2 rival gangs starting a turf war over that newly voided territory like in real life with a gang boss dies and rivalries over turf get bloody. Mods have attempted to integrate consequences like that which could result in one person's game world being entirely different than another person's, but its never been done at the professional big budget level. I'd love for someone to attempt that but its a complex algorythm and as of now, "real consequences" take place on a scripted template. Choosing to kill someone when its not in the script breaks these games, it doesnt ripple outward.

No one's said Fallout: New Vegas? Well then...

There's Baldur's Gate 2 as well.

Speaking of Fallout 1 and 2, let's not forget the low-INT playthroughs and how they changed the games, or simply how the reception of the character changed. They wouldn't be able to do that these days, block quests because ones INT wasn't high enough, change dialogue, I doubt they'd even let NPCs with a dislike of blackskinned characters like in Morrowind go live these days.

Highly recommended reading for those curious about low-Intelligence Fallout 2 http://lparchive.org/Fallout-2/Update%201/

Gamechanging Done Right, right from the start. To get it into a modern game would be a good bit of extra voice-acting and motion capturing, writing and scripting but it would be treasured so much. It will be done again.

Black Ops 2 surprisingly did a great job with this. Things that in most games would result in a game over screen turned into plot changing events. As one of the few people who only play Call of Duty for the story, easily my favorite Call of Duty by far.

Blade Runner had 13 different endings influenced by decisions such as who you killed and didn't kill, where you went with certain dialogue options, decisions you made during Voigt Kampf screenings, and even whether you got to certain locations or conclusions about the story fast enough because the game was running in "real time" in the background the entire time.

It's a real shame the game was nearly impossible to get running and then they lost their save for Random PC Game, seeing Dave and Vinny finish this game would've made my life.

In the modern era after "meaningful choices" became the new fad, Witcher 2 was the only one I've played to offer something other than very superficial changes.

Bioware, while having popularized this trend, has yet to achieve this in the last 10 years.

Most games BIG GAMES just loop back, like Mass Effect....all those choices and really it it just loops back to nothing more than colors and some text. A lot of games do that or that make other parts of the ending so vast (universe explodes) so who cares if one or two people die...because the ending doesn't care. The games where your choices are dwarfed by other events are not as fun as developers think.

I can only think of game game where the ending matters "Heavy Rain". In that game you can tie up several meaningful lose-ends that affect the overall ending, and there is no huge "mega event" that overshadowed those smaller victories/discoveries...those event are it.