Does Baldur's Gate 3 Really Have 17,000 Ending Variations? Devs Defend Their Claim
Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke and head writer Adam Smith addressed the issue of the huge number of endings in their flagship work. NOTE: minor spoilers possible.
The news is about the endings of Baldur's Gate 3. Therefore, it will be safer to inform you early on that it may contain minor spoilers regarding the story's finale.
This July, the publishing director of Larian Studios, Michael Douse, announced, that the full version of Baldur's Gate 3 would feature as many as 17,000 different ending variations. And although the veracity of this information was not particularly questioned at the time, the Belgian developers decided to return to the topic after a few months. This thread was commented on by the director of Baldur's Gate 3 Swen Vincke and the game's head writer Adam Smith.
In an interview with the editors of IGN the developers explained that the ending in BG3 is not limited to opting for the Emperor or Orpheus. According to them, there is a whole host of other choices leading up to that final decision, which split into further branches.
"It's one of many decisions you make, but if you look at the number of variations of how you can get to that ending, it's very large," Vincke explained, adding that screenwriter Chrystal Ding spent 'a good part of her life' working on the ending dialogues.
The developer added that some of the decisions are very diversified, while others are more "subtle." However, they all add up to one huge whole, which had to be included in the dialogues.
"Some of them are subtle, some depend on party composition, but there are quite a few of them if you just look at the number of texts that had to be inserted into the epilogues just to include them," he continued.
Vincke revealed that Larian spent more than a year refining the endings and the resulting individual dialogues. And while the most important issue for players is the aforementioned choice between the Emperor and Orpheus, it's really just a drop in the ocean of decisions that have their greater or lesser consequences in the plot.
As proof of this, Smith cited the plot of Devil Raphael, which can significantly affect the ending if players make the right choice at a certain stage of the game.
The ending of Baldur's Gate 3 is also heavily influenced by which character we play. Vincke used Gale here, for whom the ending is quite different from the rest of the characters.
Given the examples provided by the creators, no one should doubt anymore that all this really adds up to the impressive number 17,000 ending variations we can experience in Baldur's Gate 3.
