Back in July 2023 – the month before Baldur’s Gate 3 finally released after spending years in Early Access – Publishing Director of Larian Studios said Michael Douse that the Dungeons-based role-playing game with around 17,000 possible endings. “Wow,” you might be thinking, “that’s a lot of endings!” How long did it take the team to do this?” Well, Larian Studios has finally given us an idea of how much time the developers spent on all of these endings.
In a long IGN interviewLarian Studios talked about the decision making in the game, Karlachand playing as an evil little bastard, among other very pernicious themes. At some point, the studio was asked about the game’s several thousand endings. Game director Swen Vincke jumped in along with lead writer Adam Smith to explain what the team has been working on BG3s finale for “more than a year.”
Of course, there aren’t literally thousands upon thousands of completely original, handcrafted endings Baldur’s Gate 3, but rather that the ending you receive can reflect, in large and small ways, the decisions, actions, successes and failures you have experienced throughout the game, allowing for thousands of possible outcomes. At one point, IGN asks the team if the ending in some way boils down to “an almost binary decision” the player makes late in the game about whose side to side with.
“What the epilogues do and what you see in the structure at the end of the game, which allies will also be present… that’s better reflected in the epilogues now, but they define how you end the game,” Vincke replied. “People focus a lot on that one moment, but that’s only a small part of what the actual ending is. When we talked about the ending, we had a whole team that spent over a year just working on the ending and the descriptors. So you’ve done a lot of work, that’s a lot of endings, but yes, there is a moment that is a fork in the road, that’s right.”
Vincke backed this up with a specific anecdote about Smith’s fellow lead author Chrystal Ding, who was present during the event IGN Interview and played an important role in the mapping BG3‘s endings – she said she spent “most of her life” working on the game’s thousands of endings, taking care of all the dialogue and permutations.
“And when you play as Origin you get different things. If you’re Gale, it’s something completely different,” Vincke said. “So respectfully, [the game has] many endings.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 was definitely the hottest – and horniest – game of the year and has taken the industry by storm since its debut on PC. After the Game Awards, Larian Studios brought the critically acclaimed role-playing game to Xbox consoles. However, if you were hoping for it to appear on Game Pass, then you’re in the clear. Excuse me.
