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.
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.