The thought came to mind after reading a recent post about Baldurs Gate 3 here but it reminded me of the Japense only PSX game Mizzurna Falls where if you don’t perform a certain action early in the game you are prevented from getting a true ending. While this might not be a traditional soft lock because you can still progress to a point it made me wonder none the less.
I understand BG3 might be a hard lock because the game abruptly comes to a close I am not going to get into the semantics. The only other soft locks I can think of are with Pokemon.
Shout out to the fan translation of Mizzurna Falls. An article on the ROMHacking.net website can be found here.
Not exactly the same but sort of related: the first time I played the New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts, I accidentally shot a character that is meant to be a companion, turned him and essentially all quest characters hostile and basically forced the game to direct me from the opening of the DLC to the final mission because I couldn’t do anything to side with anyone. I thought it was the shortest most bullshit DLC with not nearly enough to do for at least a few years before I played it again and realized how much I missed.
Dog/God?
No that’s Dead Money, this was Follows-Chalk.
Ohhhh lol I got the names confused.
I’ll have to try that in a playthrough one day to see how it goes.
But that is one of my favorite characters in the whole game.
Takeshi’s challenge I think it was called. Notoriously bullshit game on the famicon
King Kong for the PS2 had a fire puzzle, where if you dropped the torch in the last section, you couldn’t get a new source of fire. So you were stuck at a section where you had to burn away wood in the path forwards, but couldn’t go backwards to get the fire.
The Ooze. My memory on this is fuzzy but on genetics lab part 2, there is a room you can enter that has a checkpoint. If you enter the room then you’re locked inside and if you collect the checkpoint and die, you will respawn back into the room and your only option is to lose all your lives or reset the game. I remember getting really pissed off finding this when I was a kid because I spent days trying to beat the game and I had a really good run up until that moment.
There are a LOT of these, especially from the 8/16/32 bit era.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnintentionallyUnwinnable
Elder Scrolls Daggerfall was surely the peek of this, you get a letter at the start telling you to meet a woman in a bar on a set date - turn up too early and she won’t be there, but if you mess around on sidequests and don’t have enough time to travel there so are late then she’ll leave and the main quest never really happens.
There were a million other ways to lock your ability to progress but I always remember that, I don’t know if it was possible to get back on track but I don’t think so, I probably played a thousand hours before I did a run where I even started the main quest
Is there anyway to know that you missed her? Like a letter left behind or an NPC telling you?
I think it comes up with a little note on the screen telling you that it’s no longer possible to compete the game, you’d get that randomly in a dungeon too because two miles away a bad guy randomly died – belive it out not Todd Howard has got much better since 1996
The original Neverwinter Nights, you could kill main story NPCs and lock yourself from progressing. If you saved after this without realizing your mistake because you’re dumb, you have to restart.
Also, the original pre-order Ocarina of Time, if you did the keys on the water temple in the wrong order, it made the temple nearly impossible. Data sleuths have found a way to progress, but 14 year old me spent 20 hours trying to figure it out and quit the game.
Ys 8 has a soft lock toward the end where if you didn’t do enough side quests to build up enough affinity with your castaway group and party members you would get treated to a bad/neutral ending. Fortunately at that soft lock point there are enough ways to build up those points so you can progress past that point.
It only kind of counts but dead rising 1 fits. You have to follow an exact sequence of events, be at exact spots at exact times, or the main story ends and you can only get bad endings.
It’s actually really hard because you end up having to run from one boss to another and if you’re late there isn’t enough time to resupply. I eventually got to a boss fight where I didn’t have enough time to do anything else and I just couldn’t get past him. It isn’t that the game ends, but it just completely scaps the main story progression and says something like ‘the truth is lost forever’ .
I almost give that game a pass purely because of how much you’re meant to start over again anyway. It’s not like you spent the entire time on one perfect go through with no do overs, you’d probably already restarted a bunch of times by then, it’s just another crazy mistake you couldn’t have known you could make in that game.
Not that that really makes it better, but it’s not on par with doing the same thing in a giant RPG, unless you only got one shot or something, but knowing that game I would doubt it. I never got that far, though, that game is… weird and particular
Definitely a weird game but it worked.
FF12 had some bullshit chest near the beginning of the game… If you opened it you lost the ability to 100% the game and get the Zodiac spear ( reportedly some ability to get one in a very tedious grunts fashion but it’s been ages)
Basically the straw that broke the camel’s back for me with ff… The games story and combat was already a let down after they dropped the turn based combat like all of them ff1-ff10
But yeah generally I dislike many soft lock mechanics or illogical things that punish you for just playing the game… Oftentimes these were put in games just to sell strategy guides.
I haven’t played 2 or 3, but at the very least FF4 isn’t turn based. Its pseudo-realtime.
I remember ff4 being turn based or at least the same menu maybe active time where if your too slow npcs will act but it’s been awhile
I actually managed to soft lock a side quest in The Witcher 3 recently. If you loot a container right as a cutscene begins, the item will be removed from the container but not put into your inventory.
I managed to do this with a key (by mistake) and almost lost around 25 hours of gameplay lol.
What container is this?
Avoiding spoilers, one of the major quests has you approach and help someone fight some monsters. In that same place there is a skeleton with a key in it for a different side quest.
After you finish fighting the monsters, a dialog cutscene triggers with the person you just helped, but there is a small window of time between the combat ending and the dialog cutscene starting when you actually loot.
Is this in a garden?
No, it’s on a desolate island, and you’re trying to help solve the problem which makes it unlivable.
An island with a mansion full of mice?
I’ll just tell you, it was Hjalmar.
Yeah, I didn’t encounter anything like that. Probably fixed in the later patch…
Undertale is an indie game that promotes and encourages kindness toward others. You can play the game however you want, and there are a multitude of endings depending on how nice/mean you are in your playthrough.
But if you’re not 100% kind to everyone you meet; if you take even one unkind action toward someone, you’re locked out of the perfect good ending. And it remembers your playthrough, so you can’t ever earn it by replaying the game. I dunno if that’s been patched; I haven’t played it since about 2015, but that was the rule when I started it.
And there was no indication starting out that you had this choice. Most people default to fighting bad guys in games. There wasn’t even a hint that you could play the game as a passive, kind person and never harm anyone, despite their aggressive and harmful actions toward you.
So most gamers got locked out of that perfect good ending. Which I guess is kind of the message of the game. Every small act, whether good or bad, can affect people around you permanently. But it’s still annoying as a completionist, knowing that I could never perfectly complete a game because of a rule I wasn’t informed of when I started.
The game remembered a lot of things but you very much could do a pacifist run by starting a new game. I read about the pacifist run after about an hour into the game, decided I wanted to try it, and restarted and was able to achieve the best ending.
Yeah, you’re only locked out of pacifist if you previously did a genocide run
Edit: looking at the wiki, this isn’t true, there are minor differences in the soulless pacifist run tho
Sierra adventure games, like King’s Quest and Space Quest, were notorious for this kind of thing. Like there could be an item you have 1 chance to get, and you didn’t know, so you don’t get it and then several hours later when you’re at the end of the game, you realize you need that thing to solve the puzzle and actually move on. But you can’t. Because you didn’t get it when you had the chance and you can not go back.
I like the Unstable Ordinance from Space Quest IV that you can pick up near the start of the game. It’s entirely useless, you can’t ditch it, and if you have in your inventory near the end of the game, it blows up and kills you. Everytime. You have to restart nearly the whole game and resist the adventure game urge to grab everything that isn’t nailed down.
Those games didn’t give a fuck about your feelings. I remember some of those point and clicks had zero chill. I played one where all I wanted to do was cross the street. My character was immediately run over by a car and I had to start over. The typing games could be even worse. Oh sorry this bees nest is attacking you, here’s hoping you grabbed the bug spray under the carpet on the 3rd floor and are quick enough on your feet to type out the exact sequence of words necessary to get your character to use it. ‘Use bug spray’ sorry can you please be more specific. Oh never mind your character is dead, no saves, heres the worst 8 bit death audio anyone has ever created.
Ah, fond memories of playing Hugo’s House of Horrors and having to frantically type while a dog bites your face off.
That’s the exact game that came to mind. At least a few years ago there was a website where you could play all those games , I don’t know if it’s still up.
I thought it blew up when you went into the sewers which isn’t long after you pick it up. But still, it’s a trap you don’t realize is a problem right away and really sucked :)
In the same vein: the games in the Hugo trilogy had several fail states… each. Trying to cross a bridge? Oop, you’ve bumped against the wonky hitbox and dropped the matches you need near the river. They’re wet now and completely unusable.
Maniac Mansion was the first that came to mind for me. You select a party from a number of characters at the beginning, but unless you pick the exact right party, you’ll never be able to finish the game.
Whoa there, all of the parties have a viable path to complete Maniac Mansion. It’s just much easier if you take a musician.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you don’t give the sandwich to the small dog you can’t finish the game.
I got bit by this one. Went over to a friend’s house to spend the day playing HHGTTG. Several hours later we discovered we couldn’t win the game because I had neglected to feed the dog 15 minutes in while he was up getting a drink or something.
It really shows that Douglas Adams was an author and not a game designer with how easy it is to soft-lock that game if you visit rooms in the wrong order or spend too long or short a time exploring one. Most of the possible mistakes become reasonably apparent reasonably quickly, but not always.
Which no one mentioned the classic
come to tye first town + hit a chicken + get in an infinite fight with Delphine + don’t talk to blades + never fight alduin = Skyrim
Thus was my first playthrough of Skyrim
Isn’t Skyrim one of those games where you can mess around for a bit and eventually come back and proceed like nothing ever happened?
In Fallout 4 you can use the Nuka World DLC to push the Minutemen to whatever settlement you left Preston in or the Castle but I think there’s always the option for redemption because they are the fail safe faction. I figured Skyrim would have something similar.
Yeah you need to be imprisoned by the guard of whiterun and it’s all gucci with delphine
I stole a book for a quest with a shitton of witnesses, ran away, got out of town because of the guards having patching issues, stopped at my home and dumped my mostly-stolen inventory and returned and turned myself into the guards paying 40 gold to redeem myself for stealing a priceless book. Skyrim is a masterpiece of realism I tell you!
In Skyrim there’s a ton of ways you can hardlock yourself I believe in fallout 4 should be some too, it’s more flexible though
Can you provide an example? I think most of the time there are ways to fix mistakes; at least when it comes to the main quest line.
