Baldur's Gate 3 leads defend the claim that the D&D RPG has 17,000 endings: "Some of them are subtle"

Baldur's Gate 3's developers have explained how they tackled the game's many, many endings.

Earlier this year in July, Larian proclaimed that Baldur's Gate 3 had 17,000 different endings once you'd accounted for every permutation. Now, in a new interview with IGN after the RPG's launch, Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke and lead writer Adam Smith have addressed how they approached the mass of endings.

The pair began by refuting the idea that the ending is a binary choice over siding with The Emperor or Orpheus. "Yes, it's one of the many decisions that you make, but if you look at the amount of permutations of how you can get into that ending, it's very large," Vincke said, adding that lead writer Chrystal Ding spent the "better part of her life" working on the ending dialog.

Some of the endings in Baldur's Gate 3 are hugely different, and some less so. "Some of them are subtle, some of them depending on what your party composition is, but there's quite a lot if you just look at the amount of the lines that had to do to the epilogues just to cater for it. It's really a lot," Vincke continued.

Smith then addressed the goal behind the Baldur's Gate 3 epilogue, which launched via a patch earlier this month. The idea was to "tell everybody's story," and see how every character has changed along the way with the player. "Who survived? Who has become better because of your passing through their lives, and who is in a much worse place?" were some of the main topics for the epilogue, according to Smith.

Vincke reveals an entire team at Larian spent "more than a year" just working on the endings and their descriptors. The game director says people are "very focused" on the decision to side with either The Emperor or Orpheus at the very end of Baldur's Gate 3, but that's "just a small part of what the actual complete ending is."

Smith also highlights a choice outside of the two characters: Raphael. The devil can drastically change the ending of the RPG depending on whether you've sided with him and accepted his bargain; it is just another permutation in the gigantic spiderweb of endings. The writer also highlights the player's choice with the Netherbrain, which can again spin off into a variety of different endings.

All this is on top of the various endings you can get as Origin characters. If you choose to play as Gale, for example, Vincke says the ending is a "very different thing" to any of the other endings. Even the other Origin characters themselves can create different endings for you, depending on where they are at the end of the game - the epilogue might have them in different planes of existence, for example.

This is all to say that, yes, Baldur's Gate 3 really does have a massive amount of endings. In our own Baldur's Gate 3 interview from earlier this year with Smith, the writer tackled the massive effort the team makes to get every character to the same point by the end of the massive RPG. In short, it's very, very difficult.

Under 1% of Baldur's Gate 3 players reached the end with no companions, and even though there isn't an achievement for it, there's still unique dialog.