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.
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