It's not all about the endings though. Mass Effect famously only had 2 endings (which everyone raged about), but the plot itself is interesting to see the different branches in the story on their own.

It's not about ending, but the branching story isn't actually branching at all. You make a decision and, regardless of what you chose, end up in the same place. The amount of decisions that actually stick, or actually change your progression through the game, are very low. "Do x or y" where both X and Y cannot be undone and seem like heavy decisions, ultimately do not change the outcome of any future story items. Side with Ben or side with Jill, doesn't matter, they both treat you the same afterwards and it never mattered at all which you picked.

Even with just one ending, a game can do branching well for all the sub-story endings that most games have.

Hell, even The Witcher 3 did this incredibly well. Spoiler incoming for those who haven't played it yet.

"The Bloody Baron" quest not only has three endings, IIRC, but one of your choices can lead to entire village dying. And I'm pretty sure there's a few other variables that can end up having some effect at later points in the story.

Granted, it's probably the most-cited example of great Witcher 3 quests, second perhaps only to the romancing options (again, 3 possible outcomes), but I've already come across a few more main and sub-quests where reloading and trying a different option was meaningful.

As part of the journey, they might not affect the ending, but in an RPG style game with quests, it's just as much about the journey.

Not comparable, your choices actually "matter" as you play the game, until the end where it's revealed nothing you did mattered.

In this game the lack of choices mattering is apparent from the beginning. Most gamers may not care but for a certain type of gamer, this is a game ruiner.

For example with ME3 again, I had fun the entire way through the game, assuming my prior games' choices mattered. And there actually were different dialogue options, references to past choices, etc.

The ending was awful, and I will never replay that game ever. But if my choices didn't matter even while playing, before the ending... well that's just an awful game to a person like me. I would never play a minute of a story-based, choice-based game where I know the choices don't matter.

I'd be curious to see this for other games for comparison. The number seems high, but when I start really thinking about it, I can't think of many games where multiple endings relied on much more than a handful of key decisions.

Assuming all choices are between two options, you could make this claim about any game with (five endings and...) more than three choices for the player to make. if one of the choices has three options, two choices will do the job of selecting between 5 endings.

What's the point of the map, if all you're concerned about is which ending you get? If there are 40 choices with an average of 3 options each, it's still obvious before you buy or even hear anything about the game that it won't have 12,157,665,459,056,928,801 endings.

You fell into a local maxima or made an assumption that got you tunneled visioned.

You can definitely have N number of choices contribute to 2 or more endings and still have every choice matter.

You can have 100 choices with 3 options, and have all of the make an impact on the ending and still only have 2-3 endings. Or any number of endings between 2 and n (in your case the 12*10^m.

Have each choice do a +1, 0, or -1 to some internal metrics.

You could call this a good or evil system, but it could be a ton of different things. They could be doing +1,0,-1 to corpo, streetkid, and nomad rankings.

Some choices might do +1 to streetkid and nomad, and 0 to corpo, you could have any number of combinations. Or you could have 1 choice do +10 to corpo.

Then at the end, whichever had the highest score would be your ending. Or you could do if highest was 10-30 points, you'd get 1 ending, but if your highest was 40+ youd get super ending. Like if you were mostly corpo, but still a bit others, maybe you become middle management in final cinematic at corpo X, but if you were like ALL IN on corpo choices, maybe you'd become new president of some corpo Y.

That way every choice matters, and you can still have a few different endings. And the 'vanilla basic ending' being where you are choices were mostly neutral, or what they guessed majority of playerbase would choose.

But what OP was saying, is that 98% of questions have 0 impact on anything. Which makes them not impactful and not matter at all, and that often is boring.

The system you describe does not have the property that every choice makes a difference to the ending. Most of them still don't. An internal counter going up, without changing the ending you get, is not making a difference to the ending.

And as I updated my comment, you can ignore what I wrote about endings. Most of the decisions just flatout don't effect the world at all.

Fallout: New Vegas had a handful of endings, but is nearly universally praised for making player choices affect how you play. It's not about what endings you get so much as your actions influencing what options remain open to you as you play.