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.

hogart,
@hogart@feddit.nu avatar

Little Big Adventure 2. Just before the last boss I managed to save myself on the last island without a way to leave it. But I needed to leave and get another Ball or w/e it was to unluck a door. It was my first real pc game experience ever. Dunno why I stuck with this hobby after that tbh :)

figjam,

I played Earthbound as a kid and got stuck in a golem without the item needed to get out. Since I got it used I didn’t have the game guide. No idea how much stuff I missed but I never picked it up again.

abraxas,

I remember that, and I remember finding a way out too. I just don’t remember what it was.

I’m pretty sure that’s not a full-on softlock. Just so bad it feels like one if you miss something.

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.

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.

pastermil,

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.

abraxas,

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)

pastermil,

And I thought 4 & 5 was brutal…

abraxas,

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)

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.

leaky_shower_thought,

this one reminds me of Farcry 4. The one with Pagan Min.

if you just stay and be a good boy, you get a free trip to where you really wanted to go.

It’s easy to not do this because maybe the welcoming committee is not around anybody’s standards.

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.

Aztechnology,

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,

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.

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.

cobysev,
@cobysev@lemmy.world avatar

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,

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, (edited )

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

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

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.

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

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