12 Of The Biggest Choices We've Agonized Over In Games

The final choice in the first Life Is Strange game is controversial because it effectively negates everything else you’ve done in the supernatural teen drama while also giving you an impossible moral conundrum. As Max, a time-traveling teenager who has been through more trauma in the past week than most people go through in a lifetime, you’re asked to either sacrifice the entire seaside town of Arcadia Bay to a storm caused by Max’s repeated use of her time manipulation, letting you save your best friend Chloe while many residents die, or go back to the beginning of her story when she first discovered her powers and not use them, letting Chloe die but preserving the town. Developer Don’t Nod created an agonizing and airtight dilemma with no “good” ending that could make everybody happy. It forces you to declare what matters most to you, and a decade later, people are still disputing which was the right choice.

You know how it’s weird that we ask high school students to pick a career track and dedicate years of their lives to it in higher education, just hoping it all works out for them down the road? Picking your starter Pokémon is kind of like that. Yeah, you might gravitate toward one little guy or another based on whether or not you think they’re cute or cool, but if you don’t know what their final forms look like or what challenges await you throughout the game, you might have set yourself up for a bad time. What if you don’t like your starter’s final form? How likely is it that your starter will have bad match-ups in the early game and you may struggle to make any real progress for several hours? There are so many unknowns when picking your first friend, and you might not know if you’ll regret it until it’s too late. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a 10-year-old trainer.

Fighting games can be overwhelming. There are mechanics to learn, combos to memorize, and match-ups to be prepared for that you really only understand after hours of play. But part of that journey is also deciding on which character or characters you’re going to dedicate your training time to. Some of these games have dozens of fighters to choose from, and you never really know how they handle until you’ve taken them for a test run. Some people spend dozens of hours on a character just to decide they’re not the right fit. But when you find the fighter who fits your playstyle like a glove, there’s nothing like it.

Telltale took some pretty big swings with Batman in its episodic adventure game’s two seasons. It inverted the dysfunctional Joker/Harley Quinn relationship, had Bruce Wayne teaming up with the clown throughout, and ended on a pretty profound choice. Alfred, Bruce’s long-time butler and an invaluable support to his crime-fighting efforts, tells Batman that he no longer has the stomach for the work the two have been doing to stop crime in Gotham. He plans to leave for a permanent vacation, and while the player can protest, it ultimately comes down to whether or not Bruce will hang up the cowl or lose his closest friend. It’s a bold choice to give to the player, but it’s also one Telltale had earned over the course of two seasons. The Enemy Within reflects on whether or not Batman’s crusade and methods are worth the result, and at the end, it asks you to decide.

Save files are precious keepsakes for most players. Everyone has a devastating story of losing a memory card, or a younger sibling deleting your 40 hours of progress in a game. (People who’ve grown up in the era of cloud saves will never know this pain!) So when Nier Automata asks you in the end to delete your save in order to help someone else playing through PlatinumGames’ action RPG, it’s no small matter. By this point, you’ve put dozens of hours into the game, likely collected a ton of loot, and unraveled plenty of mysteries in the post-apocalyptic world. Giving all that up to help a stranger? What if I still have optional stuff I haven’t finished yet? You can decline and come back later, but once you do it, it’s done. The game makes a big show of it, too, painstakingly erasing your menus and inventory. Most choices you make in video games aren’t final, as you can just save scum your way around them. Nier Automata makes you live with a choice, even if you won’t see any material benefit from it.

The Mass Effect trilogy is full of choices that cause ripple effects from one game to the next. One of the most infamous happens in the first game. On the planet Virmire, Commander Shepard is forced to choose between saving only one of their first two crewmates: Kaidan Alenko or Ashley Williams. The decision not only takes an emotional toll on the Normandy’s crew, but it fundamentally changes your party for not one, but two games. Whoever survives Virmire will go on to become a potential rival or party member for the rest of the trilogy, and even within that fixed role, Kaidan and Ashley deviate pretty strongly from one another and can completely change a party dynamic. Mass Effect may not have nailed every instance of choice and consequence carryover across all three games, but the decision the player makes on Virmire starts one of the best-executed threads across all three games.

Sure, the decision you make as the President of the United States at the beginning of Saints Row IV doesn’t actually change anything, but it’s about the principle. You’ve only got enough clout to solve one of Earth’s biggest problems: cure cancer or end world hunger. It’s a silly little hypothetical that will be quickly derailed by the game’s inciting incident, but yeah, I still want to know what people choose. Even as I write this I’m wondering which would be more of an immediate good. Probably cure cancer? Maybe? World hunger could be eradicated with some change in policies, but an instant “cure cancer” button? That’s too good to pass up, right? I’m making the right decision, right? Oops, no time to think about it; there’s an alien invasion happening.

The Fable series is typically a binary, good vs. evil affair. The series got a bit more gray as it went on, but most of its choices were of the “will you help people or beat them to death with a stick” type shit that was common in the early 2000s. Fable II’s final choice is a bit more complex. You’re given a choice between one of three wishes: revive the citizens of Albion who died over the course of the game, resurrect your family, or suddenly amass a whopping 1 million gold for you to spend as you please. The decision can completely change the world’s perception of you. A hero who revives the citizens will be met with applause and celebration as they travel through the world, whereas someone who chooses wealth will only receive disdain and ridicule wherever they go. If you want to be a truly evil bastard that’s all well and good, but I can’t imagine anyone not choosing to revive their family and loyal canine companion.

Cyberpunk 2077 has plenty of big choices, but perhaps the most affecting is in its Phantom Liberty expansion. The spy thriller DLC puts you in the middle of a dispute between a government agent, Solomon Reed, and a terminally ill netrunner, Songbird. Solomon wants to bring her in so she can continue to be a tool of the state, and Songbird wants to be free to seek life-saving medical treatment. Both of them reach out to the player with their respective plans, and it’s up to you to decide who you will betray at a pivotal moment. Making either choice will send you down one of two very different paths with a completely divergent endgame. Neither is entirely satisfying, and you have to play through both to get the full picture, but no one leaves Phantom Liberty unscathed. It’s just a matter of who you’re willing to sell out in order to reach the finish line.

Most post-apocalyptic games have some element of supply scarcity—consider, for instance, how you have to scrounge for the limited number of tools you can craft with in The Last of Us—but Telltale’s first season of The Walking Dead may handle this concept more memorably than any other game. In its second episode, protagonist Lee Everett is given food rations to divide between a group of survivors, and it’s made clear to you that there isn’t enough for everyone. There are children, irritable adults, and, of course, yourself to consider. No matter who you choose, someone is going to be left wanting, and desperate people can hold a grudge like no other. Choosing who gets half an apple can sour people on you or others, and you didn’t ask to be put in this position. It was thrust upon you, and now you’ll bear all the responsibility and consequences of your actions. The group will remember this.

The Gears of War series isn’t one known for choice and consequence, but Gears 5 throws a gut punch of a decision at you in the end. As Kait Diaz, you’re forced to choose which of your two companions to save. The trio of Kait, Del Walker, and JD Fenix has been together since Gears of War 4 and was essentially the “next generation” of COG soldiers after Marcus Fenix’s run in the first three games. Now, no matter what you do, the group is one friend short. To this day, we still don’t know how the Gears of War series will handle this decision because there hasn’t been a sequel to the 2019 shooter yet. The next game is a prequel called Gears of War: E-Day, but JD’s voice actor has hinted that something else might be in the works.

The reason that The Witcher 3’s most famous quest is such an impactful one is not just because of the choice you have to make but because the twists and turns it contains are dizzying and difficult to swallow. Geralt meets a man known as the Bloody Baron, whose life story is a tragic, sympathetic one full of highs and lows. His “Family Matters” quest line, however, ties many threads from his life together until they all lead to an impossible decision. No matter what Geralt does, the Bloody Baron’s story ends tragically. It’s just a matter of where Geralt directs the most damage. By the time you make the final choice in the quest line, you’ve seen so much misfortune tied to one man that reaching this point with no real solution in sight is painful, but it also exemplifies the best parts of The Witcher 3’s storytelling and quest design.