How many endings can you truly get?

[HPL Favorite Cat]

I just beat the game for the first time. I loved almost everything about the game, except for the gameplay. I know I'm probably not saying anything new here about the gameplay but I just really didn't find it enjoyable.

Everything else though is great.

But I'm wondering, how different can the endings really be? Since I started on normal (then moved to easy just to blitz the gameplay), I was able to beat the entire game without losing and then got to liberate all the people I wanted. So I never got to see what happens when you lose and one of the people from the other team gets to go.

Like, what if you let Oralech in at the end? Or your anointed? What if none of your people get in, does the plan stay at 0% and you get a bad end? What if you purposefully let in all the other adversaries? They all have their own wants/etc.

The end screen with all the characters that you read through what happened to them during/after the end just seems like it has a ridiculous amount of possibilites.

[Lke]

A lot. Read somewhere (but can't recall where) that the devs believed there are about 20,000(?) different ending states.

Of course some of these endiding states share common stories.

From what I gather the ending relies mostly on :
- 3 "World States" which tracks the level of succes of the Plan
- Who ascended into glory, and of remainded to carry out their rightful sentences.
- the states of relationships both within the nighwing (depends conversations that may or may not happen) and with other team (depends on who you faced and who many times)

So yeah, a ludicrous amonts of endings.

[Rā's al Ghūl]

Spoilers ahead - but You know as much, Reader.

So far from what I gathered it seems there are multiple endings based on 3 or 4 main endings. And by saying multiple I mean each ending vary on Your interactions and Rites. Example will be "good" ending (actually no ending is truly good) - so You won the Rites for 7 of Your exiles. The Plan is complete then. I belive no matter if You send Oralech, Yourself, or companion, the main ending is that revolution in Commonwealth happens peacefully, banishment is no more, people are overall happy. That's the main gist. Then those "multiple" happens - You got different personal story for everyone based on what happened, choices, who stayed, interaction between characters etc. Good example for that is Oralech - if You let him go he apparently goes back to being good man doctor. If you make him stay, he throw himself into the void. Most likely dying, tho he lived through it once already.

[kid_zomb]

Hey, thank you for the kind words, and it's great to hear you enjoyed the game on the whole...!

Regarding the epilogue sequence, and I'll spoiler some of this: Some time after completing work on the epilogue writing, we did an estimate of the number of possible ending permutations in the game, and arrived at a number around 200,000,000 (two-hundred million). That's not including minor variations such as the Reader's gender (which technically do affect the text content as well as the end song).

Not every character has the same number of permutations. Characters such as Volfred and Tamitha have more epilogue variations than, say, Udmildhe or Falcon Ron. Some of the characters required unique approaches, e.g. with Sandra, or with Oralech having vastly different 'remained' epilogues depending on exactly what happened.

For me the epilogue was definitely one of the bigger writing challenges of my time at Supergiant though was something we were really keen on doing since early in the project. For me personally, ever since I played the original Fallout, with its amazing ending that reflected back on how my path through that game impacted the lives of those around me, I always wanted to be able to work on something in that vein. Hope you enjoyed it!

[Bomoo]

Originally posted by kid_zomb:

For me the epilogue was definitely one of the bigger writing challenges of my time at Supergiant though was something we were really keen on doing since early in the project. For me personally, ever since I played the original Fallout, with its amazing ending that reflected back on how my path through that game impacted the lives of those around me, I always wanted to be able to work on something in that vein. Hope you enjoyed it!

Very interesting to hear that Fallout was one of your inspirations. Looking back on it now, I can definitely see that influence, though it hadn't occured to me while I was sitting through Pyre's ending.

[Soul Strings]

Originally posted by kid_zomb:

200,000,000,000 (two-hundred million).

Uhm... Isn't that 200 billion?..

[kid_zomb]

Originally posted by Soul Strings:

Uhm... Isn't that 200 billion?..

Err yep -- the text was correct, the number was not. Fixed, apologies! And now you know why I've never cut it as an engineer...

[TheSentinel909]

Originally posted by kid_zomb:

Hey, thank you for the kind words, and it's great to hear you enjoyed the game on the whole...!

Regarding the epilogue sequence, and I'll spoiler some of this: Some time after completing work on the epilogue writing, we did an estimate of the number of possible ending permutations in the game, and arrived at a number around 200,000,000 (two-hundred million). That's not including minor variations such as the Reader's gender (which technically do affect the text content as well as the end song).

Not every character has the same number of permutations. Characters such as Volfred and Tamitha have more epilogue variations than, say, Udmildhe or Falcon Ron. Some of the characters required unique approaches, e.g. with Sandra, or with Oralech having vastly different 'remained' epilogues depending on exactly what happened.

For me the epilogue was definitely one of the bigger writing challenges of my time at Supergiant though was something we were really keen on doing since early in the project. For me personally, ever since I played the original Fallout, with its amazing ending that reflected back on how my path through that game impacted the lives of those around me, I always wanted to be able to work on something in that vein. Hope you enjoyed it!

This is one of the best games I've ever played - thank you so much for this wonderful experience. Signed: A fellow narrative game designer