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.

Sierra adventure games, like King's Quest and Space Quest, were notorious for this kind of thing. Like there could be an item you have 1 chance to get, and you didn't know, so you don't get it and then several hours later when you're at the end of the game, you realize you need that thing to solve the puzzle and actually move on. But you can't. Because you didn't get it when you had the chance and you can not go back.

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.

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...

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you don't give the sandwich to the small dog you can't finish the game.

It's not quite what you're getting at, but in Bubble Bobble Revolution you can't pass level 30 because the boss doesn't spawn. It's a soft lock but there's nothing you can do to avoid it, and the game is on the DS so there's no updates to fix it :D

Fallout 1. During the term to the Master there is a 200 second countdown.

If you fooled up the speech check or want to do it differently and reload a save that was made after the countdown started then the countdown drops to 50 seconds. Making the fight impossible to do in time.

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.

King's Quest was the king of soft locks.

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.

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. If you were too lazy to trek back to Cordon after deactivating the miracle machine (I think), you couldn't get the true ending without abusing glitches and bugs.

Xmen on Sega genesis. At one point you have to literally reset the console. I was 10 and didn't understand that's what it was telling me to do. No game had ever done that, and prof x was breaking the 4th wall telling the player to do that. The game never broke the 4th wall otherwise. I didn't understand until a decade later when I read it on some listicle.

I'm pretty sure I soft locked my New Vegas save a good few years ago, or at least locked myself out of the ending I wanted. I was going for the Yes-Man ending, but I wanted to let House upgrade the robots first. I let him do it and then killed him to get the platinum chip back, but turns out he didn't have it on him. Without any way to give the chip to Yes-Man, I was SoL. I think you can still complete the game with a couple other factions, but I know for sure that I already pissed The Legion off so I don't know how many options are left. Maybe I'll dig up that save somehow and try again.

Also, In the original Thief games (Thief: The Dark Project, Thief: Gold, and Thief 2), there was a brief fadeout period between dying and getting kicked to the game over screen. This death state didn't lock the controls, so you could still move around, interact with objects, and, critically, quicksave. If you happened to quicksave at the moment of your death, there was nothing you could do to get out of dying. There was only one quicksave slot and no autosaves, so if you weren't manually saving every now and then, you had to start the entire game over. Learned to make occasional checkpoint saves the hard way.

The death mechanic did lead to at least one hilarious fan mission where you had to get through a door and complete the mission after falling to your death.

Oh the joys of King's Quest V. The most notorius soft lock is one that happens so fast that you would never suspect it to be a soft lock. Early in the game, the player will come across a scene where a cat is chasing a mouse. Now, this should make the player go "OH NO, THE POOR MOUSE!" and help the mouse. However, the scene is tied to your CPU speed so you have a total of 2-4 seconds to go into your inventory, select the item to yeet at the cat, and save the mouse. Many players will blink and just go, "Alright well that happened." So, the player goes on and finally gets to a point in the game where Graham gets knocked out and tied up in a basement. Yeah your game just ends here if you didn't save the mouse because the mouse chews through the ropes. THERE IS NO INDICATOR, AT ALL, THAT THE MOUSE IS THE KEY TO SOLVING THE PUZZLE. NONE.

There is also another soft lock into the end game that involves you having decided to pick up a fishhook earlier so you can use it on a mousehole for a piece of cheese. Yeah, if you don't do that, you can't power a wand to use to beat the game's villain. And you'd probably think; "Oh I can just go back and get it." Yeah, you can, but if you do you'll also be trapped in there and your game is over again. So you HAVE to know to get it the first time.

And people wonder why LucasArts titles are more fondly beloved over the earlier Sierra titles.

Which no one mentioned the classic

come to tye first town + hit a chicken + get in an infinite fight with Delphine + don't talk to blades + never fight alduin = Skyrim

Thus was my first playthrough of Skyrim

Not exactly the same but sort of related: the first time I played the New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts, I accidentally shot a character that is meant to be a companion, turned him and essentially all quest characters hostile and basically forced the game to direct me from the opening of the DLC to the final mission because I couldn't do anything to side with anyone. I thought it was the shortest most bullshit DLC with not nearly enough to do for at least a few years before I played it again and realized how much I missed.

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.

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.

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’ .

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.

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.

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.

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.