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.

Theharpyeagle, (edited )

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.

JokeDeity,

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.

federated_toast,

Link to the fan mission? I’ve been getting my annual itch to go back to The City

Starglasses,

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.

Starglasses,

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.

csolisr,

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

Theharpyeagle,

I loved that game but there’s no way in hell I’d ever have the patience to 100% it, good lord.

Speculater,
@Speculater@lemmy.world avatar

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.

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.

JokeDeity, (edited )

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.

Mr_Buscemi,

Dog/God?

JokeDeity,

No that’s Dead Money, this was Follows-Chalk.

Mr_Buscemi,

Ohhhh lol I got the names confused.

I’ll have to try that in a playthrough one day to see how it goes.

JokeDeity,

But that is one of my favorite characters in the whole game.

Ganbat,

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.

AceFuzzLord,

Don’t know if anyone has said it yet, but Fallout 3. There is a story quest where you have to ask a radio host named Three Dog information about your father and it’s a percentage based skill check that if you fail it, I don’t think you can progress (unless I am completely mistaken since it’s been more than a half decade since I last played).

To make matters even worse, even at a maximum 100 in speech, the skill check can still be failed. Again, not 100% sure whether or not the Three Dog skill check is even required or if you can just run to the right place to progress the main story, but if you are a first time player you could absolutely screw yourself over not knowing about this.

loutr,
@loutr@sh.itjust.works avatar

IIRC failing the speech check is the “normal” outcome. If you convince him he gives you info you would have come across later, allowing you to bypass the next main story quest.

abraxas,

Yeah, that was always a weird one to me. It’s one thing for speech checks to give you advantages and shortcuts, but that straight up cut 30 minutes off the game.

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.

Coelacanth,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

Disco Elysium has a number of potential soft locks, though you kind of have to go out of your way to actually get into one. The easiest one is probably paying for your hostel room the second night. Usually a combination of decisions and unlucky dice rolls are necessary to actually get locked, and/or poor use of skill points (meaning you can’t spend one to re-try the crucial roll).

There is also a seemingly minor decision in a side quest that can make a certain check during the ending unwinnable and thus lock you out of one of the most impactful moments in the game.

Tilgare,

While playing Final Fantasy X the first time, I got to Old Zanarkand and inside the dome, I saved behind a sealed door in the Cloister of Trials. I wasn’t savvy to good saving practices and after solving the puzzle, got into a battle I was completely hopeless to defeat. There was no way to walk back out the door from which I entered, the only way out was through; and with my existing inventory, spells, charged up aeons, etc. I absolutely could not defeat the boss.

It was pretty crushing because this moment is so close to the end of the game, but I gave up and had to come back months (years?) later to fully start the game over. I think maybe I played 99+ hours of Final Fantasy VII and then decided to give X another try. The second time, I was much smarter with maintaining multiple save games for safety. Not to be bested again, I grinded up all of my limit breaks and aeons for safety and completely obliterated the boss in one go the next time around.

pastermil,

That Zanarkand Cloister of Trial is nowhere near the end

Tilgare,

Oh I vaguely remembered it being beyond the ¾ point, but also I wouldn’t have known and it certainly FELT like that was the case when I got soft locked.

M500,

In cave story, there is a decision around the middle of the game. If you make the wrong decision you can’t upgrade to the best weapon in the game.

I forget all the details, but i was annoyed when I found out about it.

azulavoir,

there’s several decisions like this, it’s just the way the game is

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.

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.

Nihilore,
@Nihilore@lemmy.world avatar

Takeshi’s challenge I think it was called. Notoriously bullshit game on the famicon

Staple_Diet,

Metro.

All 3 games require you do/don’t kill certain people at different levels in order to get the ‘true ending’. When I first played I just killed anything that moved, but then found out the consequences of doing so. Honestly it improved my game experience so much more when I had to carefully consider each action.

AlexisFR,
@AlexisFR@jlai.lu avatar

At least Exodus good ending is way easier to get imo, just don’t kill non bandits humans. (and don’t act like an ass around your crew)

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