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.
I actually managed to soft lock a side quest in The Witcher 3 recently. If you loot a container right as a cutscene begins, the item will be removed from the container but not put into your inventory.
I managed to do this with a key (by mistake) and almost lost around 25 hours of gameplay lol.
What container is this?
Avoiding spoilers, one of the major quests has you approach and help someone fight some monsters. In that same place there is a skeleton with a key in it for a different side quest.
After you finish fighting the monsters, a dialog cutscene triggers with the person you just helped, but there is a small window of time between the combat ending and the dialog cutscene starting when you actually loot.
Is this in a garden?
No, it’s on a desolate island, and you’re trying to help solve the problem which makes it unlivable.
An island with a mansion full of mice?
I’ll just tell you, it was Hjalmar.
Yeah, I didn’t encounter anything like that. Probably fixed in the later patch…
It actually isn’t fixed because this happened to me only a couple of weeks ago (with the next gen upgrade). But it must be an incredibly rare bug because I’ve done the “loot before cutscene trigger” a bunch of times before but only once did it glitch.