What games had easy soft locks that prevented you from either progressing or getting a true ending? angielski

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.

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

King’s Quest was the king of soft locks.

CorrodedCranium,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

Yeah? How so? While I’ve numerous clips of that game I don’t think I’ve seen what you are referring to

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

There’s like 7 king’s quests.

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/…/Sierra this is but a small sample of the pain that was old school Sierra

HidingCat,

Fuck Sierra games, it's why I gave up on them and played only Lucasarts point-and-click adventure games.

ripcord,
@ripcord@kbin.social avatar

Same although I didnt get into the lucasarts games until the 2000s. I played every Sierra game and love/hated them all not realizing there was a better way to live.

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Friends don’t let friends play Sierra games without walkthroughs

yukichigai,
@yukichigai@kbin.social avatar

Any of the Sierra "X Quest" games. Space Quest, Police Quest... so many soft locks. I remember Police Quest had a soft lock that would trigger on the first day but wouldn't become apparent until day 3 or 4.

kadu,
@kadu@lemmy.world avatar

I’m going to be honest, I find things that can permanently mess up your save (in the sense that you’ll get a lesser experience or not reach the ending) is extremely bad game design. It’s something I’d expect out of a 2 hour arcade game, not a modern release.

There are a lot of horror games in the PS1 that are “if you didn’t do this extremely specific thing, in the right order, with the right coloured t-shirt, on a Tuesday, without any hints whatsoever… Too bad! When you reach the end of the game in another 60 hours of gameplay we will tell you you’ve failed”

Baldur’s Gate might be a great game, but sometimes it’s “dice rolls makes things spicy and each run its own thing!” mechanic gets unbalanced and by a little bad luck you can have a significantly degraded experience, sometimes without even knowing it.

This is bad game design, even if ultimately the game can be good in the end.

CorrodedCranium,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

I get what you mean occasionally games like that can feel like they force the replayability aspect rather than encourage it.

0110010001100010,
@0110010001100010@lemmy.world avatar

I’d like to expand on this and say, as a 37 year old parent with a house that barely has time to play a game ONCE it’s complete and utter bullshit. I’m doing good just to finish a game, there is pretty much zero chance I’m going to play it again.

I’ll shamelessly say I do reference walkthroughs if I expect there to be choices the impact the game in big ways.

Davel23,

I'm impressed your house has time to play games at all.

all-knight-party,
@all-knight-party@kbin.cafe avatar

You should give your house regular lunch breaks, it's unethical to make it be a house all day.

Moonguide,

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. If you were too lazy to trek back to Cordon after deactivating the miracle machine (I think), you couldn’t get the true ending without abusing glitches and bugs.

kuoushi,

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.

Wizarded,

Lol I guess it never “snapped” out of it?

all-knight-party,
@all-knight-party@kbin.cafe avatar

Damn, Professor Oak fired your ass.

"No, you can't go back, this is fucking awful, give me that camera back."

offbyone,

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

Kolanaki,
!deleted6508 avatar

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.

BeanGoblin,
@BeanGoblin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

ripcord,
@ripcord@kbin.social avatar

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 :)

RaincoatsGeorge,

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.

Theharpyeagle, (edited )

Ah, fond memories of playing Hugo’s House of Horrors and having to frantically type while a dog bites your face off.

RaincoatsGeorge,

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.

simple,

I almost softlocked myself in The Evil Within (the first one). I’ve used up most of my ammo before walking into a boss fight and I just barely managed to beat him by using everything I had. It does give you ammo before the fight but it isn’t enough to win, I imagine it would be easy to softlock there. I remember spending a huge time making sure all my shots land so I don’t restart.

queue,
@queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

Merwyn, (edited )

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."

MyDearWatson616,

I think that’s the best way to handle it. Let me kill whoever I want as long as I know the consequences.

Steeve, (edited )

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.

LordCirais,

😰 You killed Daddy Caius

Gooey0210,

Isn’t it like the first quest you get? 🫠

Steeve,

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!

Gooey0210,

I would even check whether he even speaks to you first 🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

TimewornTraveler,

What kind of monster uses mods on a first playthru

Merwyn,

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

JokeDeity,

Me, more and more these days. Especially if the game has been out for a while.

JJROKCZ,

If the game is made by Bethesda then it’s warranted. They’ve never been capable of making an acceptable ui it seems

abraxas,

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.

Merwyn, (edited )

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.

abraxas,

Well… Yes. Not saying it doesn’t fit the topic. Just a really cool way they handled it all.

Merwyn,

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.

Gooey0210, (edited )

Marvelous morrowind I should’ve put some “morrowind joke” but I don’t remember any

chemical_cutthroat,
@chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t remember the exact method, and I may even be remembering the wrong game, but I think in Breath of Fire 1 there was an item that you needed that could be sold, or maybe not picked up, and if you didn’t have it, you’d get locked out of a puzzle much later in the game. It was hard to fuck up, but if you did, it was 30 hours of game down the drain.

Perrin42,

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you don't give the sandwich to the small dog you can't finish the game.

Davel23, (edited )

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.

AnyOldName3,
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world avatar

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.

wombatula,

There are a LOT of these, especially from the 8/16/32 bit era.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/…/UnintentionallyUnwinnable

InvisibleShade,

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.

pastermil,

What container is this?

InvisibleShade,

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.

pastermil,

Is this in a garden?

InvisibleShade,

No, it's on a desolate island, and you're trying to help solve the problem which makes it unlivable.

pastermil,

An island with a mansion full of mice?

InvisibleShade,

I'll just tell you, it was Hjalmar.

pastermil,

Yeah, I didn’t encounter anything like that. Probably fixed in the later patch…

InvisibleShade,

It actually isn't fixed because this happened to me only a couple of weeks ago (with the next gen upgrade). But it must be an incredibly rare bug because I've done the "loot before cutscene trigger" a bunch of times before but only once did it glitch.

Know_not_Scotty_does,

Kind of the flip of the question but far cry 5 was particularly infuriating when it came to bullshit plot devices that override the players choices/skills. The boss fights were rigged with fixed outcomes regardless of what you hit the boss with. The fact that you could hit an unarmored human in the head with a rpg and see the explosion but the game was just like “yeah but the story says he’s alive so he’s alive. Also he is about to wreck your shit for… reasons…” drove me crazy…

Pxtl, (edited )
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

This kind of stuff was what turned me off the Armored Core “Spiritual Successor” game Daemon X Machina. So many fights involved scripted foes where it wasn’t obvious they were scripted as undefeatable until I’d burned out half my ammunition.

agressivelyPassive,

That’s kind of normal, isn’t it? There are often immortal characters, that simply can’t be killed or lost or whatever. Like the dog companion in fallout 4.

amio,

It's not uncommon, but can be very grating depending on the circumstances. Dogmeat and the other companions are immortal because Rule of Fun - losing them would suck, which is why it's limited to the more masochistic (not that there's anything wrong with that) difficulty settings. Far Cry games generally try to seem realistic apart from some trademark trippiness, so when you blast someone with a rocket and they just ignore it, it's a bit jarring.

In-universe I think the idea is that you're tripping balls, it's a go-to excuse for "why is this boss fight behaving weird" in the Far Cry series.

amio, (edited )

Exactly this, Far Cry 5 did "ludonarrative dissonance" in a big way. Also, fake open world. 3 and 4 just had a bunch of annoyingly stupid story developments: you going into some Obviously Bad Idea or Diabolus-ex-machina shit - which is still really grating if you're otherwise playing methodically and cautiously, but they happened during missions and didn't intrude on the rest of the game. 5's stupid unwinnable kidnapping parties and stupid mandatory "drug trips" sure did, though.

Modding that shit away, it's still a reasonable game, but ye gods the story was terribly executed.

Know_not_Scotty_does,

That is part of why I liked New Vegas so much, they were just like “yeah you can kill Caesar in camp, go ahead, the story is now differerent and you don’t get these quests but oh well, your choice”

reverendsteveii,

I was under the impression that ludonarrative dissonance was when you purposely try to subvert the way the game “wants” to be played, rather than you trying to do what the game wants and the game failing to interpret your actions in a realistic or satisfying way. Like the people who try to be law-abiding pacifists in GTA V or people using armor stands to turn Minecraft into multiplayer chess.

Odo, (edited )

It’s when there’s a disconnect between the storytelling and the gameplay. Usual example is Uncharted or the last Tomb Raider reboot: the main character wrings their hands over the possibility of having to kill a person, but the gameplay is you mowing down an army.

thecrotch,

Or every action movie ever

flucksy_bango,

I wish I disagreed with you, the only thing I can push back on is saying the open world is fake.

It’s a damn shame, because far cry 5 has by far my favorite setting of the series. I’d love for someone to take a second stab of that kind of setting.

amio,

The open world itself is not fake, but IMO the game is "No True Open World Game" as long as it keeps hijacking you all the time. The world itself is pretty deec. If you're on PC you can try the Resistance mod, it lets you customize the game a lot including how intrusive the main quest is.

flucksy_bango,

Duly noted, I’ll check that out the next time I get the itch to play. I disliked that about the game. It’s actually my main gripe. I didn’t like being careful of not blowing up too much stuff so that I didn’t hit the “main quest threshold” or whatever.

I just want to enjoy the outdoors and kill peggies.

Are there any weapon mods? I found the variety lacking, beyond the broken dlc guns.

amio,

Tons. I think some are included in Resistance, or at least you can tweak certain things to be less airsoft-y. Haven't played in a while. Nexus has a bunch of stuff anyway.

flucksy_bango,

I kinda liked the airsoft feel, though. Makes me feel like Rambo. I guess I know what I’m doing once I’m done with starfield.

Assuming hades 2 doesn’t come out before then lol

RaincoatsGeorge,

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’ .

all-knight-party,
@all-knight-party@kbin.cafe avatar

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

RaincoatsGeorge,

Definitely a weird game but it worked.

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