What games have multiple methods for achieving one goal?

[Lokkenjawnz]

Grand Theft Auto series. A lot of the missions are simple "Get from A to B" "Kill some guy" etc., which can be solved in all kinds of amusing ways, ideally involving vehicular manslaughter, or abusing the physics systems.

[MrPopo]

Many strategy titles have alternate win conditions for their maps beyond "destroy every enemy unit". Sometimes you can win without killing any enemy units.

[prfsnl_gmr]

You can accomplish the missions in Grand Theft Auto III in many different ways. I think the later games in the series restricted the ways in which you could complete the missions, but I fondly remember improvising some creative techniques for finishing the missions in GTAIII.

I remember one mission where you have to retrieve an object or person from a heavily guarded area. The mission presents you with a sniper rifle, and - presumably - you are supposed to use it to shoot each of the guards and infiltrate the building. Since the guards start panicking and shooting back if you use the rifle, however, I decided that it would be more fun to simply steal a car, drive it directly into the compound, dive out, and then shoot it until it exploded near the largest grouping of guards. I could then neutralize the few remaining guards with a hand gun. My strategy worked wonderfully, and I ended up waltzing through one of the more difficult missions in the game.

[Menegrothx]

Postal 2. It's possible to defeat the game with out slaughtering civilians, but it's sure as hell hard It's hilarious how very menial tasks are actual goals in the game, and how the game was designed in a manner that it's almost impossible to not to go on a killing spree while performing those every day tasks

At the beginning of each day, the Postal Dude is given several tasks to accomplish, such as 'get milk', 'confess sins', and other seemingly mundane tasks. The object of Postal 2 is to finish all of the tasks throughout the week, and the player can accomplish these tasks in any way he or she wishes, be it as peaceful and civilly as possible, or as violent and chaotically as possible. It is possible, if occasionally difficult, to complete most tasks without engaging in battle, or at least, harming or killing other characters, as evidenced by the game's tagline: "Remember, it's only as violent as you are!". The daily tasks can be accomplished in any order the player desires, and the game also includes one task that is activated only when the Postal Dude urinates, in which the player is tasked with getting treatment for gonorrhea after the Postal Dude discovers he has the infection.

Throughout the course of the game, the Postal Dude must put up with being provoked by other characters on a regular basis. He is given the finger, mugged, attacked by various groups of protesters, and is harassed by an obnoxious convenience store owner/terrorist and his patrons who cut before Postal Dude in the "money line". During the game, the Postal Dude also encounters a marching band, a murderous toy mascot named Krotchy, the Paradise Police Department and its SWAT team, overzealous BATFE agents, the Arizona Army National Guard, an eccentric religious cult, cannibalistic butcher shop workers, fanatical Al-Qaeda terrorists, and former child actor Gary Coleman, among many others.

[Erik_Twice]

Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines normally allows you to talk, sneak or kill to get the stuff done, often with variations like intimidating or seducing.

Wasteland allows you to play the normal way or the cool way where you blow up every single door with dynamite.

You can get rich at Railroad Tycoon 3 whitout using any trains at all, just by using industry and manipulating the stock market.

[Cronozilla]

I think maybe Crysis is the epitome of what you're asking. You can literally do anything to get to where you're going. Most people kind of played it like any other fps game just marching forward and killing what they came into contact with. But if you thought about the encounter, you could tackle it hundreds of ways. Which is a lot of fun.

Far Cry ... the first one ... has a lot of this too. It's a very linear shooter ... but if you go off the beaten path, you can find new ways to go forward and even skip entire segments if you want, just by thinking about what's going on.

For example, at the beginning of the game, you first get outside and you go over this hill and eventually make it to this beached tanker which is a whole section of the game, there's a helicopter fight (pain in the ass) and you do all of this to release a little motorized raft to get to the next destination ... well, in the area before, before you go inside the tanker, if you look, the raft is way at the top where you would normally make your way to, but you can actually shoot the chains that are holding it and just take off without doing any of that section. And there's junk like that throughout the game.

The entire Hitman series is, "Play how you want" style. Which is, literally, here's the goals, just achieve them. You can do things in many ways and the games have gotten more liberal about how you can achieve them in each iteration. The first one is the most strict, because a lot of targets will be alerted and will flee making it impossible to actually complete the mission. And the first game acted more like a puzzle game in disguise as an action/stealth game.

What sets these games apart, from something like GTA, which is just open, in general, is that, these actually allow you to plan a unique scenario and execute it. They can be constrained sometimes, but in general, it works out pretty well.

Portal 1 and 2, also have lots of different possibilities to solve each puzzle. But that might not be what you're looking for.

[Menegrothx]

Portal 1 and 2, also have lots of different possibilities to solve each puzzle. But that might not be what you're looking for.

Portal 1 had that to some extent, but in Portal 2 a lot of times there was only the right place where the player could shoot the portal, making failing impossible. In Portal most of the time you could shoot your portals where ever you wanted, there wasn't nearly as much normal walls as in Portal 2.

[Haoie]

GTA to some extent.

[Yancakes]

Arcanum and the Fallout games immediately come to mind. Both have a huge emphasis on being able to talk your way through a potential combat situation, or use stealth and trickery, or whatever, though due to balance issues there are a few areas in Arcanum that you will get hosed in if you're not a fairly adept in combat. But even then, you always have the options to: use conventional weapons, use spells that summon people to fight for you or charming spells or whatever.

Fallout is much the same, with the classic example of being able to debate the final boss to death.

Likewise Planescape, I guess.