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Re:Cyberpunk 2077 Refunds by thaumasiotes on Friday December 18, 2020 @03:24PM (#25471465)
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.

Re:Cyberpunk 2077 Refunds by namrog84 on Friday December 18, 2020 @03:55PM (#25471858)
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.

Re:Cyberpunk 2077 Refunds by thaumasiotes on Friday December 18, 2020 @04:36PM (#25472362)
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.
Re:Cyberpunk 2077 Refunds by bird_monster on Friday December 18, 2020 @04:57PM (#25472573)
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.
Re:Cyberpunk 2077 Refunds by roywiggins on Friday December 18, 2020 @04:19PM (#25472180)
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.