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

Speculater, rok temu

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.

kadu, rok temu

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, rok temu

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

0110010001100010, rok temu

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, rok temu

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

all-knight-party, rok temu

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

kuoushi, rok temu

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, rok temu

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

all-knight-party, rok temu

Damn, Professor Oak fired your ass.

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

Aztechnology, rok temu

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.

turtlepower, rok temu

Final Fantasy Legend for the og Gameboy. I remember getting pretty far in the tower and there was some weapon or item you had to have to pass or beat something and I missed getting it and couldn’t progress and never played it again.

cobysev, rok temu

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.

bentsea, rok temu

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.

ditherwither, rok temu (edited rok temu)

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

Ganbat, rok temu

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.

wombatula, rok temu

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

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/…/UnintentionallyUnwinnable

chemical_cutthroat, rok temu

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.

queue, rok temu

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.

simple, rok temu

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.

offbyone, rok temu

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

Moonguide, rok temu

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.