Poll: Game with most effective use of choice?

[BrotherRool]

I don't actually have an answer myself yet, there have been a lot of good games that have used choice in wildly different fashions and I can see good arguments for all of the following
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Alpha Protocol - Can practically choose the fate of every NPC in the game. Boss battles change, become harder, are removed, alliances change, enemies on a level change, each choice isn't presented as good or bad, but just having different meaningful consequences both in terms of money/weapons/enemies and story considerations.

As an example, one rival you can either fight one battle where he runs away and one later on, gain a good reputation with him and do research fight him once when he runs away and then convince him to betray his employer or you can provoke him and make him hate you so that he stays and fights to the death in the first battle.
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Planescape: Torment - Allows the player to effectively choose the theme of the game and what the ultimate lesson is. Entire game revolves around the concept of choice and change
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The Walking Dead -

Spoiler

Uses choice, not to provide player with creativity and a sense of control, but to tie player emotionally to the characters and place the player in situations where they feel the doubt, guilt and responsibility of a situation in a way you couldn't do as a passive viewer

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Mass Effect (Series) - Cross game continuity with choice allowing your decisions to carry across the entire story. Has a lot of downsides, particularly a need to minimise the effect of some choices to save on resources, but the idea was ambitious and compelling all the same
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Heavy Rain - Allowed story to continue even after the death of the protagonists. A fairly large amount of flexibility, a core mechanic of the game and central to the games question of 'How far would you go to save someone you love?'
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KotoR 1 - Poster child for choice in games, using to convey the idea of light/dark side (ish), so very effective in the setting, mainly involved the fate of localised areas allowing you to change them drastically without reducing the scope of the larger narrative. Strong ending
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KotoR 2 - Used choice to push the players philosophical beliefs and to examine a preconceived universe more closely.
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Katawa Shoujo - By choosing a person to pursue romantically, ensured the player would be much more invested in the relationship and then used this choice (in one storyline) to make the players motivations align with the PCs to create a lesson that the player directly experienced and was directly relevant to them as people. Didn't quite make the final 8 because I haven't played many romance games so I can't tell if the first option is common. And the choices were labelled badly


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I'm sure I've made some glaring omissions, but that's what the other option is for! So what game in videogame history has used choice most effectively?

 

[Odinsson]

The Witcher 2. Choices in that game aren't black and white, there's rarely a 'right' one. Your choices may also have far-reaching consequences that can decide the fate of nations.

 

[Simple Bluff]

Black Ops II (well, the early choices at least).
The reason I say this is not for the choices themselves, but how they're presented - you never actually know you're making a choice, with the exception of maybe one or two near the end.
A good example of this is the desert mission early in the game - you capture a hostage and your team mate begins interrogating him. For various convuluted reasons though, the Player Character REALLY wants the hostage dead. You have to perform a quasi - quicktime event (I'm not selling this well, am I?) in order to restrain the urge of the PC to shoot him. But the thing is, even if you fail, the game still progresses - you'll just lose out on a bit of intel.
Actually, that sounded kind of crap as I wrote it out, but there are much better ones later on in the game that's hard to divulge without spoiling. To be honest, it reminded me a lot of the choices in Spec Ops: The Line but I'm not gonna get into that, as I'm sure by the time I'm finished writing this, there's gonna be plenty of more capable people covering that paticular base.

Where the choices fall flat is their consequences. Some choices were supposed to be inconsequential (beyond aesthetics), which I kinda appreciate actually, but even the "big" choices had no (visible) payoff. On my first playthrough, I got the "not everything turned out that great" ending, but I didn't even realise at first because the game didn't ACTUALLY show anything that bad happening. It's as if Treyarch were too polite to tell people that they fucked up.

Meh, it's obviously not the best game that ever handled choices, it almost seemed like a washed out version of Spec Ops, but they were certainly a lot better than I (or anyone else) was honestly expecting. There was visible effort put in by the devs, and I like to give them credit for that.

 

[Timi Pungracic]

Still judging usage of choices only by the endings... -.-
otherwise i vote for The walking dead. The main flow of the story or the ending may not change, but the interactions and everything surely do. If I kill someone in real life, people will not just be angry at my funeral, but throughout my whole life. Just saying...

 

[Blunderboy]

For me it's The Walking Dead.

For the first time in my gaming life that I can recall, a choice wasn't some arbitrary decision between right and wrong, good and evil, yaydadada.
It was just a choice between two options, both of them potential as bad as the other.
And you know what? I found myself making choices I never thought I would have.

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

It depends on how one measures the success of "choices". If we're talking about how wide-reaching your choice was geographically or politically, I would say the Witcher 2. If it's the ability to present the grey area inherent in human choices then Mass Effect totally failed and either The Walking Dead or Planescape would take this one. If it's about the narrative and emotional framing that leads up to the choice, thus giving it more power, probably Heavy Rain. If it's how much the choices end up determining the remainder of your gameplay and thus the (hopefully multiple) ending scenarios, I'm not really sure about that. The Walking Dead didn't do so well in this regard, and I'd probably say Chrono Trigger.

Someone needs to use the OP as a blueprint and combine all of those strengths, because I think that game is still hypothetical right now.

 

[Janus Vesta]

Personally I think Fallout New Vegas had the most effective use of choice. None of your choices, or at least very few, are considered outright evil. Usually you pick a side and work to their best interest or you try to get people to compromise. The story isn't about how one person has vast amounts of power, it's about how one person can influence events and their outcomes.

You always end up in the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, but what factions play a part, and what side they're on can change drastically depending on your choices and actions. Plus you're made to feel important without being built up as some god who everyone else is waiting for.

 

[Maxtro]

For me it's Dragon Age: Origins.

Save the village or don't save the village
Let this guy live, or kill him or have him join your party
Make a deal with a demon
Sleep with everybody
Become the king or put somebody else on the throne

Most importantly, your choices actually had an effect on the world and on the game's ending.

Unfortunately, Dragon Age 2 was a major step back.

 

[BrotherRool]

Black Ops II (well, the early choices at least).
The reason I say this is not for the choices themselves, but how they're presented - you never actually know you're making a choice, with the exception of maybe one or two near the end.
A good example of this is the desert mission early in the game - you capture a hostage and your team mate begins interrogating him. For various convuluted reasons though, the Player Character REALLY wants the hostage dead. You have to perform a quasi - quicktime event (I'm not selling this well, am I?) in order to restrain the urge of the PC to shoot him. But the thing is, even if you fail, the game still progresses - you'll just lose out on a bit of intel.

I love that sort of choice, there are times in the Walking Dead where you start punching someone with QTEs and you can actually stop at any time by failing the QTE.

In particular there's one scene where there's a guy who you've got very good reason to want to kill and he's lying in the mud and you start punching him and you can keep on doing it and the camera will cut to all your friends watching you... it's a very powerful moment.

They even have a graph of how many times players punched him, and there's this huge spike at the time the camera draws back and shows everyone else looking at you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp2VIUL2-ZM#t=6m5s

Still judging usage of choices only by the endings... -.-
otherwise i vote for The walking dead. The main flow of the story or the ending may not change, but the interactions and everything surely do. If I kill someone in real life, people will not just be angry at my funeral, but throughout my whole life. Just saying...

Hi! If you don't mind me asking, whose that directed towards? I was trying to frame the question to stray away from that mindset, there's a deeper question into what is the core satisfaction we even take away from choice and how it influences the player rather than the game. To me the best thing about the Walking Dead isn't so much how the game world is affected by the player but how the choice affects the player.

The best example is when you've got to give out rations, it doesn't affect anything at all but it makes the player live the sensation of having to make those difficult choices. If they did it in a film or book, it would be an intellectual thing where we learn about the protagonist from how he chose, but because we had to make that choice instead we empathised with the pain of the situation

 

[redmoretrout]

Walking Dead had the best narrative in a video game I have ever seen. And the choices do help the player to become more invested in the characters and story.

Though I should state I have not yet played Planescape: Torment. I keep hearing good things about it, but haven't got around to playing yet.

 

[Sleix]

For me The Witcher series does it best. The choices and consequences make the game a fantasy version of ours, there is no "Paragon" ending, there is no "Bad" ending, your actions affect the world in different ways, some choices leave you thinking, "Was this really the right thing to do?" It's really the lesser of two evils in The Witcher and early game choices can radically change the game later, and I'm not exaggerating, a choice at the start of Chapter 2 in the second Witcher game completely changes where your character goes, who he talks to and even down to who he can have sex with. It's truly an amazing series.

 

[rob_simple]

I'm going for the original Deus Ex because it's the only game I've played where your choices can have an impact much later in the game, as opposed to most modern choice systems that just changes what ending you'll get.

I also really enjoyed Human Revolution's conversation trees because they felt really natural and made me think a little bit --I actually only had to reload a save once to get the outcome I wanted-- again, as opposed to games like Fallout that have the next to the evil choices.

 

[BartyMae]

I would say Planescape: Torment or Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer.

 

[Lilani]

I rather love Bastion's choices. The more you think about them, the more complex it gets. Spoiler'd in case some poor soul still hasn't played it.

Spoiler

At first the choice simply seems to be continue on despite the destruction, or reset the world and try again. But there are so many implications to these choices. If you choose to evacuate, then all the people who died remain dead, and you passed up a chance to save their lives. So you get to go on a new adventure, but you have that bearing down on you the whole time. And if you choose to restore the world, then everything gets reset but you have no idea if it will even work. And there's also the question of what kind of a hero you want to be--if you evacuate, then your deeds will be known and you'll be talked about for generations. But, as the artwork in the credit shows, if you choose to restore then you just go back to the Rippling Wall and nobody will know all you went through for them (not even you).

And then there are a couple of hints that are given as to what happens, if you do choose to restore. Rucks says "see you in the next one," hinting at history repeating itself after you restore time. And then if you start a new game after completing it once, there is a point in the dialog where Rucks will stop himself and say "Wait, haven't I already...ah forget it." Another hint that this isn't the first time this has happened. But it's all so ambiguous that it lets you just keep thinking about it.

 

[Xarathox]

None, and it certainly wasn't Mass Effect, since by the third game all choices made prior were completely retconned.

 

[Leemaster777]

Personally I think Fallout New Vegas had the most effective use of choice. None of your choices, or at least very few, are considered outright evil. Usually you pick a side and work to their best interest or you try to get people to compromise. The story isn't about how one person has vast amounts of power, it's about how one person can influence events and their outcomes.

You always end up in the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, but what factions play a part, and what side they're on can change drastically depending on your choices and actions. Plus you're made to feel important without being built up as some god who everyone else is waiting for.

Agreed. Fallout: New Vegas makes the best use of choice in any game I've seen. You can literally kill every NPC in the game, and SOMEHOW the game finds a way of making the story progress regardless.

And while the final battle itself doesn't really change depending on what you've done, the ending does. Everyone you've encountered, whether you've helped them, hurt them, or done nothing, are represented there, and it gives weight to what you've decided to do up until then.

 

[LetalisK]

The best I've seen so far is Alpha Protocol. Like the OP says, they go to great lengths to make the story as malleable as possible.