While the writer wasn’t obviously talking about so many different endings, it is still an impressive number of variations, highlighting how much the choices players will make will have an impact on the story up to the very end.
So, are we talking something like the equipment on the player during the ending cutscene? Without more details I don’t see how this figure is supposed to be impressive.
Probably just some quests that get a “what happened to them”-scene in the ending.
Like Quest 1 can have outcome A/B/C and Quest 2 has A/B
And you already got AA, AB, BA, BB, CA, CB variations, add some more quests and you got 17k outcomes easily.
What matters though is how many major endings there are.
Lol I’m sorry what’s that again? 17,000?!?!
So, 17k loose “if” statements defining if some single sentences will pop up during the ending scene.
if player has killed love interest-> And the love interest remained deadif player has killed love interest AND ressurrected-> And the love interest died, but got betterif player has NOT killed love interest-> And the love interest never died, just as their love
etc etc
I’m sure that, while 17k may be mathematically and technically true, they’re going to be virtually indistinguishable. I’m pretty hyped for the game but I also don’t care for the obviously clickbait claim.
I agree and I suspect companions are carrying a lot of the weight for this calculation.
Hypothetically, if there’s 10 companions with 10 individual endings each you’d get 100 endings right there. Add in 10 main endings and you get 1000, add in 4 major side quests and 4 variations each and you’re at 16,000 ending variations.
I’m not entirely sure why, but I don’t think that adds up. 10 companions with 10 different endings is a total 100 endings, however there are apparently 1.7x1013 combinations if you were to pick any 10. I don’t entirely know if I did the math right there.
So you don’t have 1000 endings from the 100 total companion endings and 10 main endings, you have 110 total endings.
Either 17,000 is a figure from the various combinations (compare that to Fallout 3’s purptorted 300 endings) or there are 17000 total ending “slides.” The former is much more likely.
Unless I’m getting the math wrong myself, for any “pick 1” combination set like this we’re dealing with just multiplying the combination sets together. Technically we’re multiplying by the factorial of the sample size, but 1!=1.
We’re not picking any 10 from within the subset of 100; you cannot pick both ending 1 and ending 4 from companion A and then no ending at all for companion C. I’m assuming each individual sub-ending is mutually exclusive with the rest of its sample space. That difference of assumptions is what led to your 1.7x1013 combinations.
