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.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you don’t give the sandwich to the small dog you can’t finish the game.
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."
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.
Elder Scrolls Daggerfall was surely the peek of this, you get a letter at the start telling you to meet a woman in a bar on a set date - turn up too early and she won’t be there, but if you mess around on sidequests and don’t have enough time to travel there so are late then she’ll leave and the main quest never really happens.
There were a million other ways to lock your ability to progress but I always remember that, I don’t know if it was possible to get back on track but I don’t think so, I probably played a thousand hours before I did a run where I even started the main quest
Is there anyway to know that you missed her? Like a letter left behind or an NPC telling you?
I think it comes up with a little note on the screen telling you that it’s no longer possible to compete the game, you’d get that randomly in a dungeon too because two miles away a bad guy randomly died – belive it out not Todd Howard has got much better since 1996
