17,000. That's how many permutations of Baldur's Gate 3's ending you might come across, the result of hundreds of choices across dozens of hours of gameplay. Those constantly-branching narrative pathways are a cornerstone of tabletop D&D, but bringing them to life in a video game seems like an impossible task.
According to Baldur's Gate 3 writer Adam Smith, however, that perception comes from a common misconception of the idea of a branching narrative. "It's not that you start at point A, and then you keep branching and branching and branching," he tells me, his hands tracing an arboreal outline in the air between us. "That's often how people think of it, but the problem with that would be that if I make a choice, then I branch over here, and suddenly I'm over here and I can't get back [to the trunk]."
