"There will be 36 different endings," said Adam Badowski, managing director of CD Projekt Red.
"Thirty-six world states," corrected Michal Platkow-Gilewski, the company's head of marketing.
It's a subtle difference, but the two explained that the PS4 and PC game so thoroughly tracks player choice that the end result are a lot of changes, from the tiny to the major. When I asked the two how many smaller changes the game endings might see, Platkow-Gilewski said the team stopped tracking those when they got to 300.
The safest description, they decided, was to broadly tell players that The Witcher 3 will deliver three entirely different, playable epilogues. And those three different playable endings can only be achieved by playing through the game and making different choices, they said.
"The game is quite complex," Badowski said. "We didn't mean to develop something special for the endings, it's a natural consequence of the story line. The story has hundreds of different branches and sub plots. We have to just sum all of those elements up in the epilogues. Some of those elements are taken from the very beginning and some from other moments of the storyline. All of them will connect in the epilogue.
"We have a lot of things to summarize. We didn't spend time on inventing endings, it was just the consequence of those choices."