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.
This exactly. Say there are three possible main endings. Multiply by origin characters, then multiply by PC classes for slight variation, then multiply by races for slight variation.
3*6 + 3*30*40 is 3,618
I think her not being able to answer off the top of her head was not having a calculator handy
This seems close to the mark. If there are 17,000 endings, most of them have to be based on trivial things, not major decisions. So z*x*y*a=17,000. We know there are 10 or more story companions, so we can chop off a zero to account for character composition. Then we have x*y*a=1,700, where an are specific story decisions. We can imagine that race or class likely play some role in the ending, and if not both, then certainly dialogue tags associated with those races or classes. So we can likely chop off 2 more zeroes as the multiple of potential tags with each other. So I think saying there are maybe 17 decisions of varying significance seems like a reasonable number.
If you subtract origin specific endings, number gets to like 11, which is very believable.
