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

Fextralive on the size of the different aspects of the game.
Again, cant watch it myself but will likely contain spoiler especially as he also talks about ending variety. Watch at your own risk, use the chapters to jump over stuff you do not want to hear.

I haven't watched the video, so I might be wrong. Wouldn't be surprised if I was. But I think a lot of the ending variety or at least part of it is going to depend on where your companions/origin characters end up. Dead? Living? Doing something here. Or somewhere else.

I didn't see any spoilers in it. Mind you, I'm well spoiled by now.

Yeah but we're talking 17000 ending variations. He also specifically asked how many main endings there were and they didn't know. We're still comfortably looking at BG3 having the largest amount of possible endings in an RPG even just on the number of main ending without going into minute differences like which companions lived through the playthrough and so on.

Ok so definitely no save import sequel happening in a million years then

Depending on how it was calculated it might be far less impressive than it sounds.
The number of possible permutations increases very fast with the number of decisions. Even old games like Fallout 1 and 2 probably had several thousand possible ending combinations.

Yea, I'm calling complete bullshit with that, unless we're talking "oh, those bandits you might have killed in the very beginning of the game were either alive or dead" equates to two "different" endings.

If the game has even 10 main endings(and it very likely will) that's still more main endings before permutations than anything that's been done before. It it has 20+ main endings before smaller permutations that's way more than most people will even know what to do with. And they are going full on D&D do whatever you want sort of approach here so yeah, there will be a lot there. When Larian say they don't know how many core endings there are, that almost certainly doesn't mean five...we're most likely easily looking at over a dozen.

The 17000 figure is definitely all the permutations based on minute detail...maybe read the rest of what I said after the 17000 figure. They don't know how many main endings there are, so we're probably looking at over a dozen...possibly multiple dozens.

I wasn't trying to talk negatively or nitpick. It's just a lot of the different endings I think will come down to minutiae.

And of course there will be at least ten different endings seeing as each of the origins will have at least two.

I think for me, I think of possible endings as "How many unique ways are there to conclude the main narrative?" An origin companion that isn't required might have an "ending", but I consider that flavour to the ending. It's like with Final Fantasy VI, it's a completely linear game with a single ending, but you can technically have a bit of flavour added to the ending if you rescue certain people/recruit other companions/etc.

this "We don't know how many endings we have" thing seems extreme exaggeration/marketing.

Yeah, they can't not know the endings, they had to write them, record the, animate them, no way they don't know. They probably do mean the minor variations in this context.

Even outside of the origins I very much expect there will be more to the endings than just "push gud button and push bad button" variants. Especially when you talk about D&D and how many deities are all vying for control and power...there will be more there than we're ready for. There are the mind flayers, the dead three, a good variant to fight off both, an evil variant to fight off both and probably some other interested parties, each offering a different picture for how they'd like to shape the world should you ally with them. I also suspect there will be variations where you can try to become a god with divinity yourself and possibly re-unify the titles held by the dead three or leave them vacant.

True, but there is a difference between 'a text scroll that says what happens to x and y' and an actual, true ending.

Take classic Baldur's Gate: You fight Amelyssan, talk to Solar and you either - ascend, or not.
In my book, that's one ending, because it plays out the exact same everytime.

You can count it as two, because you can ascend or not.
You can count it as four, because you can be good or evil
You can count it as seventeen, because there are four optional romances
You can count it as 546 * 17 = 9.282 because you can have different party compositions.
You can count is as 9.282 * 5 = 46.410 if you take into account can *not* have a party member with you in every slot.

BUt all in all. There are four text scrolls about what happens to you. God/No god + Good/Evil
There is a bit of text for each of the companions, 23 + 8 romances.

That's it.

The game has over 175 hours of cutscenes so I doubt you'll see any text scrolls or power point presentations talking about each companion.

Yup. It is absolutely bullshit. And it makes me wonder why people like Fextra are pushing such obviously bullshit exaggerations about the game?

You guys REALLY should pay attention to the context or at least watch the video before saying stuff like this. The fact the 17000 figure is based on minute detail is honest and upfront. Nobody is claiming there will be 17000 entirely different endings...that's not what is being said here. But it should give you an idea of how vast the spectrum of choice is. If each ending has 1000 minute variants then there's 17 endings...but I have a hard time even imagining 1000 variants per ending. And I don't expect each ending to last five hours going over the fate of every peasant either.

Yes, but not 17000 different cutscenes for the ending. This refers to 17000 'save states' ; so; "With the death of Baron Bignose, the barony thrived under Lady Smellyfoot. The Gnomes of the region praised your name and turnips were sold throughout the land, one of them was even named after you. "

Well, the quality of those endings, or the level of satisfaction one gets from those endings, matters a lot. If some endings are way more satisfying, gameplay-wise, than others, why would anyone pursue those other lesser endings? And let's keep in mind that people on this forum are not even close to being representative of the general player base, in which the vast majority of people will play the game only once or at most 2-3 times. So as someone who will play this game only once, or at most twice, having a lot of possible endings actually bothers and worries me, because I could potentially invest 150 hours playing the game only to end up with one of those crappy endings (from my pov).

And as many here know, for me my playthtrough would need to be entirely a 'good' playthrough. And I will continue to insist, until someone can provide hard evidence to the contrary, that the 'good' paths in this game are meaningfully inferior to the bad/evil paths BY DESIGN.

Which means the actual number of things that are represented in the endings is no more than 15.