Does any modern RPG actually have meaningful choices anymore?

[Oliver]

Played through the first few hours of a recent release last night -- I won't name it specifically, but the 'choice' system was essentially pick dialogue option A for a slightly warmer tone or dialogue option B for a slightly more blunt tone, with outcomes identical regardless.

Baldur's Gate 2 was doing genuine consequence-driven branching in 2000. Planescape: Torment the same. I'm not asking for perfection, but I'd like the illusion of agency to at least require some effort to maintain. Does anyone still play RPGs where the choices actually feel like they matter, or have we more or less accepted that modern RPGs are linear games with the aesthetic of choice layered on top?

 

[Tyler]

Dragon's Dogma 2 is the only one in recent years that actually made me feel like my choices had real weight. Everything else is Mass Effect face-paint -- same ending, different color filter. BG3 comes close but even that falls apart in act three. Oliver's question kind of answers itself -- the industry figured out players don't finish games anyway so why spend the budget on branching.

 

[Lukas]

Worth distinguishing between choices that affect the narrative and choices that affect systems. Strategy games do the latter well -- every decision in Crusader Kings 3 has a cascade of real consequences. The RPG genre seems to have largely abandoned the former because meaningful narrative branching is expensive to write and most players see only one path anyway. That said, the games that do get it right -- Planescape being the obvious example -- are genuinely irreplaceable for that reason. It is a shame the economics don't support it more.

 

[Jake]

Honestly I've never played an RPG specifically for the choices. Witcher 3 I just picked whatever felt right at the time. Didn't track consequences, didn't care. But I get what Oliver's saying -- if the selling point is your choices matter and they don't, that's just false advertising.