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.
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.
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."
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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