Avowed lead says it's "very hard to say" how many endings the RPG has, but it's in "the double digits, and you can end up with a lot of different combinations of them"

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It's not 17,000, but it's still quite a lot

Pillars of Eternity
(Image credit: Obsidian)

The amount of possible endings for Obsidian's upcoming RPG Avowed is in the double digits, game director Carrie Patel has revealed.

"That is very hard to say," Patel said in response to IGN asking her how many endings are in Avowed. "I can tell you that our ending slides number in the double digits, and you can end up with a lot of different combinations of them. I mean, this is an Obsidian game, so your ending is really the sum total of your choices across the game, across a lot of pieces of content, depending on what you encountered and what you did when you found it."

Of course, this doesn't pack quite the same punch as Larian's now-infamous claim that Baldur's Gate 3 has some 17,000 variations of its ending. In truth, the two claims are incomparable, as Patel seems to be referring to the amount of completely different ending "slides" common in RPGs, which would still shape your overall ending, whereas Larian was saying there are 17,000 permutations for a much smaller number of primary endings. Make sense? I hope so. 

That said, Obsidian probably isn't keen on inviting comparisons of scope to Baldur's Gate 3, a game that has triple the word count of the entire Lord of the Rings book trilogy and whose cutscenes are twice as long as all eight seasons of Game of Thrones combined. And to be crystal clear, the only one making any comparisons of that kind right now is me, so uh, sorry about that.

Avowed, meanwhile, has been billed as a more conventionally Obsidian-coded experience that doubles down on the developer's strengths. 

Obsidian did, however, compare notes with Baldur's Gate 3 to make Avowed's companions "mercurial" with "distinct personalities".

Jordan Gerblick
Jordan Gerblick

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.