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.
Tes 3: Morrowind, every NPCs can be killed and of course if you kill some of them before they got usefull to progress the main quest you are locked.
At their death there is a notification message like “you fucked up, you can reload or continue to play in this world forever doomed”. BUT, in my first playthrough some broken mod I installed was hiding this message …
Also, in the same game you could lose quest item and be unable to finish the main quest. But that kind of require you to be stupid on purpose, because it’s obvious what item are important.
EDIT: found the in game message: " With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
Good news. You can still beat the game if the “thread of prophecy is severed”, but it is fairly challenging and generally requires stumble-luck or at LEAST knowledge of how to normally beat the game. It helps to know the identity of another character you have to kill in cold blood to get “almost back on track”. And then the location that serves no real purpose except to get back on track from that situation.
Yes indeed, I know what you are talking about. But I would not really consider that the “normal” ending as described by OP. Even if the ending scene itself is exactly the same, it’s a very different path and clearly a much harder one.
Well… Yes. Not saying it doesn’t fit the topic. Just a really cool way they handled it all.
Sure ! And I discovered that only years later by reading a wiki page. But actually it make sense that it’s also feasible this way.
What kind of monster uses mods on a first playthru
It was some small QoL changes in the UI and menus, recommended by my friend who recommended me the game. I don’t remember exactly the changes but there was nothing big added or changed in the gameplay
Me, more and more these days. Especially if the game has been out for a while.
If the game is made by Bethesda then it’s warranted. They’ve never been capable of making an acceptable ui it seems
First time I played I had to load a save back in Seyda Neen because I killed some poor half naked dude in his shack in Balmora. Fuckin Caius Cosades.
Isn’t it like the first quest you get? 🫠
Hey man, Morrowind quests don’t hold your hand! It’s not like there’s a minimap and some big ass marker over his head saying “don’t kill and rob this half naked dude who looks like a skooma addict in his tiny studio apartment because he’s secretly the spy master for the main faction in the game”! I was young! I chose violence!
😰 You killed Daddy Caius
Marvelous morrowind I should’ve put some “morrowind joke” but I don’t remember any
I managed to soft lock the new Pokemon Snap game in the tutorial where they had you take a picture of a Butterfree (I think is the right Pokemon). Somehow when I took a picture, it flapped its wings and turned enough that it was flat in the picture and couldn’t be selected when you were at the next phase of the tutorial selecting the shot to show the Professor Oak stand in. You couldn’t go back to take another picture, so I was effectively unable to continue the game from there. I was pretty proud of my bad picture taking skills.
Damn, Professor Oak fired your ass.
“No, you can’t go back, this is fucking awful, give me that camera back.”
Lol I guess it never “snapped” out of it?
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.
Fallout 1. During the term to the Master there is a 200 second countdown.
If you fooled up the speech check or want to do it differently and reload a save that was made after the countdown started then the countdown drops to 50 seconds. Making the fight impossible to do in time.
I think you just helped me solve why I never finished it when I was 8 lol.
I was at the ending but was never able to finish it before the countdown ended. Now I need to install the game again!
In every game in Suikoden series, you’d have to recruit 108 characters in total to get the true ending.
Around half of these are part of the story, so you’d get them whatever you do, but the rest you’d have to do some sidequest to get them, a lot of them are missable.
Also, you can get some characters killed, dooming you from ever getting that true ending.
Suikoden 1 and 2 in particular have very precise soft-locks.
In Suikoden 1, Pahn has to win a battle that seems to be a scripted loss.
Suikoden 2 (my favorite RPG of all time) is actually beyond brutal. There’s a 3-5 second timed input that doesn’t even make much sense and if you get it wrong, nothing predictable changes except you don’t get the 108th star (just one person having a private word with the strategist that only makes sense later)
And I thought 4 & 5 was brutal…
I dunno which of the two is worse. I fell for the Pahn one in S1, but managed to guess right in S2 by sheer luck (it’s between a default “Watch Out!” and “Nanami!”. You have to pick “Nanami!” or you lose out on the good ending. And you automatically say “Watch Out!” if you don’t pick fast)
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.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced had tons of missions that required items and gave items. Your inventory had a cap so once you reached it you needed to decide on which inventory items to dstroy to make space for new rewards, or leave the rewards behind.
There were so many repeating quests so those rewards were safe to destroy. But if you destroyed a required item from a one-time quest(i don’t think there was anything special to mark these one-time side-quests)… no 100% game for you.
You could also save your game mid-battle. I learned the hard way I shouldn’t have saved in a major story battle. Death in those were Game Over. There was only one save slot, so I was locked in a battle I had no chance of surviving.
Mid-battle saves were a separate temporary file. Once you loaded the file, it deleted itself. Basically an extented pause since it was a mobile game. Your main save would have been unharmed, though saves were manual so who knows how far back you were. Some battles were forced whenever you entered the tile, so you could easily be surprised an unprepared. Especially that babus fight with marche alone. Was always tough back in the day.
Oh that was it, the temporary save thing. I loaded it, and then I was stuck.
I loved that game but there’s no way in hell I’d ever have the patience to 100% it, good lord.
I went through that exact problem, didn’t have space to stuff a single item from a mission I thought would be repeatable and so I got stuck in 99% completion - the only solution was to trade it from another cart and that was not gonna happen
Oh the joys of King’s Quest V. The most notorius soft lock is one that happens so fast that you would never suspect it to be a soft lock. Early in the game, the player will come across a scene where a cat is chasing a mouse. Now, this should make the player go “OH NO, THE POOR MOUSE!” and help the mouse. However, the scene is tied to your CPU speed so you have a total of 2-4 seconds to go into your inventory, select the item to yeet at the cat, and save the mouse. Many players will blink and just go, “Alright well that happened.” So, the player goes on and finally gets to a point in the game where Graham gets knocked out and tied up in a basement. Yeah your game just ends here if you didn’t save the mouse because the mouse chews through the ropes. THERE IS NO INDICATOR, AT ALL, THAT THE MOUSE IS THE KEY TO SOLVING THE PUZZLE. NONE.
There is also another soft lock into the end game that involves you having decided to pick up a fishhook earlier so you can use it on a mousehole for a piece of cheese. Yeah, if you don’t do that, you can’t power a wand to use to beat the game’s villain. And you’d probably think; “Oh I can just go back and get it.” Yeah, you can, but if you do you’ll also be trapped in there and your game is over again. So you HAVE to know to get it the first time.
And people wonder why LucasArts titles are more fondly beloved over the earlier Sierra titles.
King’s Quest VI, if you wait a few minutes on the strting beach, there’s a 5-pixel momentary glint that turns out to be a coin. If you leave the beach beforehand, it’s gone forever and the game is in an unwinnable state.
That game was horseshit and I really want to give it another go
I always forget about the coin because I learned my lesson from all the bullshit one screen items from Space Quest IV as well. Also, I’d like to mention the game that was programmed to never let you get the true ending due to legal issues. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream could never be truly beaten for the best ending in the French and German releases. Mainly due to the character Nimdok’s storyline being entirely centered around Nazis and the surgical “experiments” that happened. I’m not here to dwell on that, but what I am here to dwell on is that when the game was released, French and German players could not get the true ending due to CyberDreams forgetting to check off the trigger for Nimdok succeeding in his game. So, the game was always in its fail state up until 2013 or so when it was finally released on Steam and GOG. The game was in an unwinnable state for those releases for almost 20 years. No revised version with a fix was ever issued until the worldwide release.
I’m pretty sure I soft locked my New Vegas save a good few years ago, or at least locked myself out of the ending I wanted. I was going for the Yes-Man ending, but I wanted to let House upgrade the robots first. I let him do it and then killed him to get the platinum chip back, but turns out he didn’t have it on him. Without any way to give the chip to Yes-Man, I was SoL. I think you can still complete the game with a couple other factions, but I know for sure that I already pissed The Legion off so I don’t know how many options are left. Maybe I’ll dig up that save somehow and try again.
Also, In the original Thief games (Thief: The Dark Project, Thief: Gold, and Thief 2), there was a brief fadeout period between dying and getting kicked to the game over screen. This death state didn’t lock the controls, so you could still move around, interact with objects, and, critically, quicksave. If you happened to quicksave at the moment of your death, there was nothing you could do to get out of dying. There was only one quicksave slot and no autosaves, so if you weren’t manually saving every now and then, you had to start the entire game over. Learned to make occasional checkpoint saves the hard way.
The death mechanic did lead to at least one hilarious fan mission where you had to get through a door and complete the mission after falling to your death.
Yes Man is the failsafe ending, so you should always be able to do it I’m pretty sure. Killing Yes Man should work like killing Victor and he just jumps to a new body if I remember correctly.
Link to the fan mission? I’ve been getting my annual itch to go back to The City
Xmen on Sega genesis. At one point you have to literally reset the console. I was 10 and didn’t understand that’s what it was telling me to do. No game had ever done that, and prof x was breaking the 4th wall telling the player to do that. The game never broke the 4th wall otherwise. I didn’t understand until a decade later when I read it on some listicle.
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.
It’s not quite what you’re getting at, but in Bubble Bobble Revolution you can’t pass level 30 because the boss doesn’t spawn. It’s a soft lock but there’s nothing you can do to avoid it, and the game is on the DS so there’s no updates to fix it :D
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
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.
Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you don’t grab the newspaper at the beginning of the game, you get totally softlocked near the end.
