Baldur's Gate 3's lead writer on the "spiderweb" formation of the game's 17,000 endings

gamesradar.com:

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]."

That reality would be useless for a player, who might inadvertently find themselves out on a narrative limb with no way to return to the main story. Any human Dungeon Master could improvise a way back, but the more prescriptive storytelling of a video game means that's not really possible. So instead, the narrative of Baldur's Gate 3 "is more like this big spiderweb - the end of the game is [the centre], and the start of the game is [the outer edge]. So you're always heading towards the same point, and what happens when you get there is very different. But it interweaves, so you're kind of dancing between plots."

Smith and game director Sven Vincke demonstrated those interweaving plots in a recent livestream, showing how two stories ran perpendicular to each other, allowing a player the chance to jump from one thread to another, should the mood take them. Central to that leap is a character called Jaheira, a face that