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.

  • kadu@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • 0110010001100010@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Corroded@leminal.spaceOP
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      1 year ago

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