My favorite is in the Dawguard DLC for Skyrim. If you somehow get far enough into the DLC to enter the Soul Cairn and you didn’t do the main story quest where you kill your first dragon, you’ll get unique dialogue with a dragon you meet in the Soul Cairn. He calls you Dovahkiin, and you can ask him why he called you that, to which he responds something like “I do not know, it just felt right to call you Dovahkiin. Perhaps you will learn why soon”
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Although, it’s less foresight for random actions and more of a way to set the tone for the rest of the game.
There are two possible outcomes of how one of the early missions plays out, depending on actions you wouldn’t initially consider.
There’s a hostage crisis and if you don’t listen to Sarif and get to the transport on time, they’ll all be dead when you arrive there.
Thing is, you’re not really given like a ticking clock on the top of your screen or anything. And in most games, you expect the “meet me there now” thing to not actually matter much, because oftentimes NPCs will act either as if we’re perfectly on time or just make a minor note about it in dialogue. We’re also used to most missions starting the same or only with minor differences depending on choice, but there is no explicit choice here.
So if you treat it like any other game, ignore the quest marker, and just wander around the building, exploring and looking for interesting shit before actually leaving, you arrive at the location and get berated because you took too long and now a bunch of innocent people are dead because you were fucking around.
If you go immediately, you have a chance to actually save them all.
I think you’ll actually find a lot of stuff like this in immersive sims, just due to their nature, although it’s less “we know you’re going to do this exact thing” and more “you’ve got freedom and we know you’re going to do something we didn’t expect, so we’ll embrace that instead of limiting your options”.
I know that when Arkane was developing Prey, they knew the GLOO Cannon was going to be experimented with in a bunch of ways that they couldn’t necessarily anticipate, so instead of imposing limits on it, they embraced it, gave the gun to you at the beginning (well, very close to beginning) and just said “go wild”.
They basically turned what would otherwise just be a random, only semi-important utility into a super useful tool for traversal and combat engagement. Went from “cool, does gluey things” to “okay, I’m going to make a staircase with this thing because it looks like there’s something up there”.
Apparently, they were inspired by Bethesda’s famous lack of usable ladders up until that point, which is pretty funny. Or rather, they used that as a metaphor for design in general (though, they did put up posters or notes or something that just said “NO FUCKING LADDERS”, if I recall, but I’ll have to find the video/article about that later).
It was basically this approach of “there doesn’t need to be a ladder if you can make one yourself”.