Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Fextralive on the size/replayability/reactivity of BG3 - Spoiler

17000 endings came from the same place as the 175 hours of cutscenes. It's just hype and bullshit in order to get the anticipation up to fever pitch before the release. Stay calm.

You have to remember here that a lot of this stuff is also subjective. What you may enjoy may be different from the next person. And there is also the matter that Larian tried to put in something for everyone but not everything is for everyone. Nobody is likely to see everything and not every bit that was put it was merely put in based on expected popularity either. There is a lot of depth to the game. I think a lot of the beauty in this game will be about all sorts of players finding paths and outcomes they really enjoy even though on the popularity poll those might not be near the top.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it "bullshit" more like "puffery" - I think that is probably an accurate number if you count all the final ending permutations but the overarching ending are probably in a more reasonable 10-20 range.

There are probably also some secret ending outcomes that contribute to the main ending in various ways.

The point is that there are way more outcomes than we may realize.

Look at it this way, at 2,000 hours in EA I still find new stuff, mainly reactions. I was 1,500 hours in before I discovered you could I was 800 hours in before I realized you could It was 3-4 playthroughs in before I even found the Kuo-Toa...

This is the result of making clickbait, if what you're saying isn't really what you're saying, then expect people to call bullshit. "We don't know how many endings there are" is pure bullshit based on them trying to increase the hype even more. I get it, they want to sell their game, and saying "Well, there are 10 possible endings to the main narrative" isn't quite the same as 17,000, but don't get annoyed if people call out the exaggeration.

In my opinion, if there is really 20 totally unique endings to the main story, that will be incredible.

Agreed, saying the game has 17000 endings is an exaggeration that relies on technicalities, I don't think the claim does them any favors.

My guess is 1 ending per origin and different ranges of good/evil inside each, it also depends on what constitutes a ''different'' ending but I doubt there's more than 10-12 endings, wich is completly fine by me.

I think all the stats they've shared about number of words and cinematic duration is just bad PR that some people is going to believe and feel lied to and the other half is going to call bullshit on it for obvious reasons. It might not ''technically'' be a lie but ''we all know'' what it means.

Nobody is making clickbait...jeez. Calm down for two minutes. The 17k figure isn't a lie but it also doesn't say what you immediately assumed it said either. Not to mention that no reasonable person would make that assumption either. The 17k permutations is a fact meant to illustrate how much reactivity the game has. And no matter how you slice it this game will still have by far the most endings than any other game ever made...whether you want to count it by unique endings or small permutations.

These kinds of clickbaits make the game look worse. I know this game will be good, but this kind of shit is really making it look bad.

I am calm, and I don't like you pretending I'm emotional to belittle my argument.

Guys you should actually watch the video, he made it abundantly clear that that number is every single small variation included.

"this is clickbait"

"No it's NOT, watch the video, he explains it!!!"

????

At least someone understands. And besides, Fextralife has never been unreasonable in his coverage of BG3. It takes a really bad kind of disingenuous take to think that 17000 number is ultra unique endings without permutations.

The title doesn't mention that number.

The part that impresses me is that it means they are tracking at least 17,000 different elements in the game's save state in order to determine exactly how the end scenes play out. That's a lot of detail to track.

"There's 17 000 variations of the story" is maybe more accurate, as variations aren't necessarily large?

Fextralife is apparently the sort of person to be pleased he can minmax multiclass with infinite free resets at every level. He was legitimate happy about this. I don't expect the guy to be very precise

Agreed. And for me, my disagreement here isn't even really with Larian. I appreciate that they want to promote their game in every way they can. My issue is with all the gaming journos out there who have completely abandoned any sense of journalistic professionalism in turning themselves into BG3 and Larian cheerleaders. I have yet to come across even one analysis of the game or interview of Larian devs/Swen in which some of the many legitimate tough questions that exist about the game have been asked. If I'd been the interviewer to whom that Larian dev had thrown out that 17k number, I would've pushed back. I would've been complately civil and respectful, but I would've pushed back hard.

I seem to recall an interview in which Swen or someone else at Larian said they weren’t actually going to say or use the number of different permutations of endings because the number was so stupidly big no one would believe it. Sounds like someone might not have been on message, but that even though it wasn’t Larian who shared this number directly, that might have been the right call!

Personally, this isn’t something that exercises me at all. It just sounds like there are lots of possible things that can happen and that might influence exactly how the game, and the ending, play out. Which is great, though I’m unlikely to be counting exactly. It’s the journey that matters most to me, though of course I hope each of my playthroughs and characters does indeed get a finale that suits them.

They're not. Well, not necessarily, anyway. 8 binary true or false flags has a total of 256 combinations between them. Raise that number to 14 and you have 16384 combinations. Make it 16 and you have 65k.

Obviously they likely have more variables than that and then quite a few combination of variables that are not valid. But the 17k number is probably reached by multiplying the number of different states each of the key variables can have and then subtracting all the invalid combinations.

Edit: And this is without considering equivalence grouping. For instance, BG2 ToB had a total of ~15 companions of which you could choose 0 to 5. So for slot 2 you have 16 options, for slot 3 you have 15, then 14, then 13, then 12. That's a total of 524k different permutations of end game credits, and that's before we consider romance options. But that math is deceiving because the individual companion epilogue was static and entirely unaffected by who you parties with or what you did. Jan's ending is the same in every single permutation where he appears, so arguably they're all equivalent in the Jan-aspect.

Given the very low number of moving parts needed for 17k endings this makes more sense to me. If all the main characters have two different paths or could die and there are absolutely no other variables you hit 177,147 endings. Add half a dozen other considerations and you're at 11 million. From what we've heard of Larian's take on reactivity I wouldn't be shocked if the number hit quadrillions of variations of ending.

This is Fextralife the king of the unfinished wikis.