Back in July of 2023—the month before Baldur’s Gate 3 finally released after spending years in early access—Larian Studios’ director of publishing Michael Douse said that the Dungeons & Dragons-based role-playing game has some 17,000 possible endings. “Wow,” you might be thinking, “that’s a lot of finales! How long did that take the team?” Well, Larian Studios finally gave us an idea of the time the developers spent on all those endings.
In a lengthy IGN interview, Larian Studios talked about in-game decision-making, Karlach, and playing the game as an evil little bastard, among other very spoilery topics. At one point, the studio was asked about the game’s multiple thousands of endings. Game director Swen Vincke stepped in, alongside lead writer Adam Smith, to explain that the team worked on BG3's finales for “more than a year.”
Of course, it’s not that there are literally thousands and thousands of wholly original, handcrafted endings for Baldur’s Gate 3, but rather that the ending you receive may, in ways large and small, reflect the choices, actions, successes, and failures you’ve experienced throughout the game, allowing for thousands of possible results. At one point, IGN asks the team about whether the ending, in some ways, comes down to “an almost binary decision” the player makes late in the game about who to side with.
“What the epilogues do, and what you see in the structure of the end of the game, which allies are going to be present also... that’s now reflected better in the epilogues, but those do define how you end the game,” Vincke replied. “People are very focused on that one moment, but that is just a small part of what the actual complete ending is. When we talked about the ending, we had an entire team that spent more than a year, just working on the ending, descriptors. So they did a lot of work, that’s a lot of endings, but yes, there’s a moment in there that is a bifurcation, that’s correct.”
Vincke backed this up with a specific anecdote about Smith’s fellow lead writer Chrystal Ding—who was present during the IGN interview and played a major role in mapping BG3's endings—saying she spent “the better part of her life” working on the game’s thousands of finales, dealing with all of the dialogue and permutations.
“And if you play as an Origin, you get different things. If you’re Gale, that’s a very different thing,” Vincke said. “So respectfully, [the game has] a lot of endings.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 was definitely the hottest—and horniest—game of the year, having taken the industry by storm since its debut on PC. Following The Game Awards, Larian Studios brought the critically acclaimed RPG over to Xbox consoles. However, if you were hoping for it to hit Game Pass, well, you’re SOL there. Sorry.