I might mention that 17000 ending permutations isn't actually all that much. Just a basic calculation: if you have 10 NPCs and each of them can have three endings, name them "good ending", "evil ending", and "dead", you'll end with 3 to the power of 10 = 59049 ending permutations. And you'd only need 20 different scenes for that, two for each NPC.
