An RPG with more player choice than Baldur's Gate 3

Baldur's Gate 3 took the turn-based RPG concept and blew away all previous expectations. The game captures the essence perfectly DnD experience, allowing players to customize their characters and embark on an epic quest across Faerun. However, where the game really excels is the amount of choice the player has to choose from, as basically every decision can have a significant impact on their gameplay later on.

Despite some of the most extensive dialogue trees and countless branching paths, there are still a few games that can provide players with even more possibilities. Some are very similar in setting and format, while others take a slightly different approach to RPG choices, giving players the ability to choose their own path from start to finish.

Tyranny

Engagement Laws of the Earth

• Shape the political structure of the entire world from scratch.

• Every faction, region and companion can be used and reshaped.

Tyranny puts the player in the role of an agent of the evil empire and immediately turns traditional RPG morality on its head. Before the game even begins, major world events are decided through a conquest prologue that permanently alters factional power, regional control, and character relationships, giving players the ability to make decisions right from the start. These early decisions feed into each quest line, ensuring that no two campaigns follow the same path or create the same political environment.

Unlike Baldur's Gate 3which offers branching paths within a mostly solid world state, Tyranny it makes the world itself malleable at the systemic level. Entire quest hubs can be wiped, spared, enslaved, or transformed based on individual decisions, which can often lead to very different outcomes each time the player attempts a new run. The focus on long-term geopolitical implications ensures that players are constantly thinking about the future and how best to achieve their goal in the late game.

Disco Elysium

The choice becomes your identity

• Personality traits and beliefs determine how the world will respond.

• Emotional reactions and even failures have an impact on the plot.

Disco Elysium it does away with traditional combat and replaces it with something much more personal. Instead, players go through psychologically charged encounters, slowly changing internal traits that greatly impact dialogue options and their outcomes. Moreover, they not only choose what to say, but create a belief system that controls how the reality around them is interpreted.

While Baldur's Gate 3 emphasizes the results of external branching, Disco Elysium focuses more on internal decision-making that

it permeates all aspects of the world. Investigations can collapse before the player's eyes, radically change course, or come to unexpected conclusions based solely on the chosen personality, lending the game an incredibly unique feel that is personal and ultimately incredibly liberating.

Divinity: Original Sin 2

Complete system freedom

• Each obstacle has several solutions.

• Main characters and major plot points can be bypassed or rewritten.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 favors player freedom as much as is humanly possible. Its world functions as a sandbox of interconnected mechanics, where stealth, dialogue, and brute force are valid solutions for nearly every encounter. This allows players to continue down whatever path they choose without feeling blocked or forced to change their approach.

The possibilities extend far beyond dialogue, as entire story arcs can be skipped or changed through clever use of the game's systems. Similarly, the implications are much more ramified. Players are able to kill important NPCs as soon as they are introduced and still follow a path that doesn't block them from progressing, allowing them to lean into the roleplaying idea that literally anything is a valid choice.

Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous

From Heaven And Back

• The tone of the narrative is heavily influenced by the paths he takes.

• Control over side characters and endings.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous it operates on a scale far beyond that of most RPGs, where players control not only their personal morality, but also the metaphysical direction of the universe itself. The Mythic Path system allows players to transform into beings from all sides of mythology, each with their own unique stories, arcs, and interactions with the world.

The game isn't afraid to push the envelope, either, as players begin to reshape the laws of reality and influence large regions through a series of interconnected decisions. After all, no goal is too small for players to achieve. Whether they want to obliterate existence or ascend to another realm, the choice is theirs, and the path to achieving those ends is nothing but a straight line.

Fallout: New Vegas

No more boundaries

• Factions to side with, betray, or ignore completely.

• The endings reflect dozens of long-term decisions around the world.

Fallout: New Vegas remains one of the purest examples of consequence-driven RPG design. Mojave is divided between several competing powers, each with fully realized political goals, internal conflicts, and moral contradictions, challenging players decide how to solve each group's problems, whether through diplomacy, aggression, or something else entirely.

Rather than leading the player to a pre-defined “good” ending, the game allows absolute control over who ultimately rules the region, or if anyone rules it at all. Virtually every major faction can change significantly over time. The endgame reflects the hundreds of smaller decisions accumulated over the course of the campaign, turning one player's journey of survival into an overarching story that includes countless choices and crucial decisions made both at the beginning and end of the game.