Fallout 3: A Post Nuclear Blog brings us a longer transcript of the recent OXM podcast.<blockquote> OXM: Have the number of endings been finalized…..how’s that coming along?
Todd Howard: Being that we are Bethesda…everything gets a bit big. So as of last week we’re over 200 endings. That is not an exaggeration, but it deserves some description. 200 endings…that’s a lot. So originally when we started, we had various iterations of the ending. The ending is kind of cinematic, that’s dynamic based on the things you’ve done.
When we started, it was kind of fuzzy, it was like “well there’s like 9 maybe 12″ and we started adding things to it. So if you had done this or not this, you’d get this other tweak to the ending. And we kept doing that. And you know even just two weeks ago someone had this idea, “Oh we should add this idea to the ending” (sorry I’m not going to spoil what that is). And I said, “oh that’s a genius idea, we have to do that.” But then it became, “oh, but there’s four versions of that.” So i was like, “okay there’s like four different versions of that part,” and that multiplies by, at the time we were at about 60 endings…so now there’s four versions of that, so now there are around 240 versions.”
The games on paper when we get started…they’re alot smaller, and then as we go they get bigger…we can’t stop ourselves. We’re have tons of people with good ideas here, and if they’re good and fit the tone, we’re going to try to jam as much into the game as possible. Fallout is probably twice the size of what we originally had on paper…it’s pretty big, so that’s what’s happened with the endings.
So some of that stuff is the big things of what you do very late in the game, some of those are things like your karma — how you’ve lived your life from the beginning of the game — you get certain scenes based on your karma. But we kind of like the ending as much as like the game itself at the beginning is you tailoring your character and then you play throughout this game, and unlike Elder Scrolls, where it’s a game where you can keep playing, Fallout 3 has a definite ending. So we wanted to go to efforts to make sure that the actual ending you get when you finish and get the ending, and make that ending reflect and make it individual to the user’s experience. We’ve definitely gone a little overboard.</blockquote>This appears to be confusing some people and to be honest, Todd's being very vague. But he appears to be talking about Fallout 1/2-style permutations (the "ending slides"), in which case 200 really isn't all that much. Per explains:<blockquote>Fo1 has 19 different endings, with 360 possible permutations. Fo2 has 47 endings with 1,105,920 permutations. If 200 is the number of permutations for Fo3, they are seriously behind. That would correspond to maybe 10-20 endings. But I'm assuming they'd have to be talking about permutations since you should know when designing a game whether you'll have ~12 or ~200 endings. You don't accidentally hop from 12 to 200 endings late in the development process and send in an order for 188 additional voiceovers from Ron Perlman (because he will KILL YOU). With permutations it would be thinkable, at least.</blockquote>AI programmer Jay Woodward appears to be in agreement here, as we calculate that 255 permutations only requires 8 different yes-no variables (2^8-1).
Todd Howard: Being that we are Bethesda…everything gets a bit big. So as of last week we’re over 200 endings. That is not an exaggeration, but it deserves some description. 200 endings…that’s a lot. So originally when we started, we had various iterations of the ending. The ending is kind of cinematic, that’s dynamic based on the things you’ve done.
When we started, it was kind of fuzzy, it was like “well there’s like 9 maybe 12″ and we started adding things to it. So if you had done this or not this, you’d get this other tweak to the ending. And we kept doing that. And you know even just two weeks ago someone had this idea, “Oh we should add this idea to the ending” (sorry I’m not going to spoil what that is). And I said, “oh that’s a genius idea, we have to do that.” But then it became, “oh, but there’s four versions of that.” So i was like, “okay there’s like four different versions of that part,” and that multiplies by, at the time we were at about 60 endings…so now there’s four versions of that, so now there are around 240 versions.”
The games on paper when we get started…they’re alot smaller, and then as we go they get bigger…we can’t stop ourselves. We’re have tons of people with good ideas here, and if they’re good and fit the tone, we’re going to try to jam as much into the game as possible. Fallout is probably twice the size of what we originally had on paper…it’s pretty big, so that’s what’s happened with the endings.
So some of that stuff is the big things of what you do very late in the game, some of those are things like your karma — how you’ve lived your life from the beginning of the game — you get certain scenes based on your karma. But we kind of like the ending as much as like the game itself at the beginning is you tailoring your character and then you play throughout this game, and unlike Elder Scrolls, where it’s a game where you can keep playing, Fallout 3 has a definite ending. So we wanted to go to efforts to make sure that the actual ending you get when you finish and get the ending, and make that ending reflect and make it individual to the user’s experience. We’ve definitely gone a little overboard.</blockquote>This appears to be confusing some people and to be honest, Todd's being very vague. But he appears to be talking about Fallout 1/2-style permutations (the "ending slides"), in which case 200 really isn't all that much. Per explains:<blockquote>Fo1 has 19 different endings, with 360 possible permutations. Fo2 has 47 endings with 1,105,920 permutations. If 200 is the number of permutations for Fo3, they are seriously behind. That would correspond to maybe 10-20 endings. But I'm assuming they'd have to be talking about permutations since you should know when designing a game whether you'll have ~12 or ~200 endings. You don't accidentally hop from 12 to 200 endings late in the development process and send in an order for 188 additional voiceovers from Ron Perlman (because he will KILL YOU). With permutations it would be thinkable, at least.</blockquote>AI programmer Jay Woodward appears to be in agreement here, as we calculate that 255 permutations only requires 8 different yes-no variables (2^8-1).
PR at its best I guess....
unlike in the Fallouts 
