As a gamer from yester year the worse feeling for me was always when I beat a really hard boss or level or simply put in alot of Time in a game and turned off the console and forgot to save 😂. Sorry kids, that was before hard drives, and check points being so numerous and auto saves werent even a thing. Next worse was when id play through Resident evil and not have enough ammo to defeat a boss, or getting to a boss with very little health. I remember fighting virgils brother in Devil May Cry and it took me nearly 3 hours because I barely had health so I had to be nearly perfect to beat him.
Many Sierra Online games also allowed you to save in the middle of an action you were performing, such as walking... So if the destination of your walk is a place you'll get killed, and you saved in the middle of that walking action, restoring it becomes similar to the endless loop of death in the first Doctor Strange movie, but with no way out of it.
The German Magikarp softlock is infamous, but I didn't know about the Mr. Briney glitch. There's also a very situational softlock in Red, Blue and Green. We're your only pokemon is a Graveler with self-destruct and explosion for its only offensive moves.
I forget it is/was a program or hardware bug for a ten year old game, but "Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth" would glitch and then "Failed To Load" for the rest of that cartridge. Finally learned about the possibility to exchange with Nin or download... after Nin had ended all support for the 3/DS servers:(
The glitch has been fixed, but there was a nasty one in RockBand 3. During the campaign, you were sometimes able to choose a set of songs, or single song, to play at a venue. If you were presented with a band whose name had more than 32 characters in it, unless you finished that set, when you came back your entire save file would be corrupted beyond repair. You didn't even need to play it; only be presented with it as one of your 3 choices. You were safe if you played any of the songs and got presented with a new setlist, but if you quit during that screen it was GG. The reason for this is that the game didn't expect any band's name to be that long, so it would auto-save the last characters of it over other data in memory. Getting a new list would put everything back to normal, but in the first few weeks of release that bug was incredibly scary since nobody knew what caused it and it felt completely arbitrary.
This is why bounds-checking is important, kids. Buffer overflows are no joke. ...That bug is basically _exactly_ the HEARTBLEED bug inverted; instead of _reading_ chunks of memory adjacent to a buffer that it wasn't supposed to have access to (and sending the potentially-sensitive contents to your website visitors), RockBand's code was _writing_ data into the memory immediately adjacent to the artist-name field in the save file... and corrupting whatever data was *supposed* to be stored there, making for unreadable save data. If there's any silver lining on this, it's that developers HAVE started to learn from the literally thousands of buffer overflow bugs that have cropped up in released software. Any reasonable dev team's standard for C code will be that they're required to always perform fixed-size writes to fixed-size memory areas. If your save data stores artist names in a 32-byte buffer, then you don't say "write the_name to save.artist_name", you say "write the first 32 bytes of the_name to save.artist_name". Doesn't matter if the_name is "always" smaller than 32 bytes. (That's fine, then it will still always fit!) Doesn't matter if you always make sure to check first. (In fact, don't waste time checking, because if you just always do fixed-size writes then there's no REASON to check.) You just shut up and do it the safe way, every time. Turns out, we can be taught! Only taken 4 decades and counting... 🙄
Additionally with Code Veronica, by proxy with the metal detector, if you put the wrong item in the 3D printer, it will lock all your progress I made the mistake of putting the metal case inside before checking it, and destroyed whatever enthusiasm I had for it
The worst save glitch I've ever had was in Far Cry 2. When you make it to the second map You have to park the truck in the garage. If you park it too far over it can force you to spawn in the back of the truck. And because it's in a garage YOU CANT GET OUT OF THE TRUCK AT ALL... And unfortunately I had only the auto save because of how it's saved worked. And I saved manually in the truck because I've had crashes in the garage...
Shoutout to Golo the Gamebreaker in the original Wii release of TLoZ Skyward Sword. If you talk to him at the wrong time your game will get locked. They even made a special Wii Channel to let you fix your save if this happened to you. There was also a sofllock in Metroid Other M. If you backtracked after unlocking a certain door, the door would relock and never open again, so you had to start over or send your SD card to Nintendo so they could fix your save.
I've encountered bugs in Skyrim a time or two Like dragons flinging all over the place And characters either forgetting what they're doing, or stopping mid sentance and softlocking your progress
For me it was the Arcwind Point word wall quest. Still tons and tons of walls to find but the quest line where the greybeards tell you the location never progressed. So then it’s just if ya find one, ya find one. If not? Oh well.
Not a soft-lock, but in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, I managed to fall between time and space in Cosmo Canyon 😅. There is an icon called the Abandoned Ship, I believe, and is a ship that is stranded on some rocks. You're supposed to use one of the wind machines given throughout Cosmo Canyon to land on it, but in one of my attempts, I missed and instead landed on the rocks propping the ship up. I landed between a crevice and...whoops, now I'm in the void! The way the map glitched, I was kind of sent to another section of CC though I was still in a void (I could see a few assets from another area). I figured I could fast-travel back to the main village, but couldn't, the option of fast travel wouldn't appear. I tried to use the world map to fast travel elsewhere and couldn't. I wasn't sure when I had last saved but I realized I couldn't get myself out, so I reset. Thankfully, I guess I had saved it not long before then and I hadn't done anything important before I fell through the game, so I didn't lose any progress. But to this day, I'm wary about that abandoned ship. There's some other light bugs that Square Enix haven't yet addressed with the Dustbowl colliseum, too. I'm watching someone else play the game for the first time and there's a bug where the enemies in this arena will wait about thirty seconds before attacking you. It does mean that you get some free hits in but it's weird when you begin the battle and the enemy just stands there...menacingly 😅
Summoner 1 on the ps2, there is a glitch that hits about 15 hours into the game where an event is supposed to happen on the world map to progress it pulls you seemingly randomly from the world map into an area. the games system flag to check if the event will spawn happens within minutes after starting a new game, so if the game decides not to spawn the event you won't know until you need the event to spawn, 15 hours into the game... restart and pray is all you can do... thank you devs for 10 hours of running around in game and weeks trying to find out what happened
Physics games like Portal must be a nightmare to do QA for, I just realized. Needing to think outside the box to accomodate for how the players will think can't be easy and hence many ways of needing to save the player from themselves, lol. I've never played a Portal game, but they do look fun.
Another soft lock can be found in the Wii version of the first Skylanders game. In the later half of the game, upon completing the Quiksilver Vault, you will be asked if you want to proceed to the next level, Arkeyan Armory. Here you HAVE TO say yes. Otherwise, the game soft locks you out of proceeding.
@11:45 I'm legitimately shocked by that one. It's generally easier to just have 2 copies of the NPC, one on each side of a ferry... rather than require the game to track the position of a NPC for no reason.
I legitimately thought that my inability to defeat the final boss in Twinsanity was either a skill issue or minor glitch. Nope, the game can just randomly despawn the grappling hook.
I'm reminded of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within... there's a chance where if you get the Water Sword on your way to get the good ending, the door to the final boss will refuse to open. If you saved just before it, the door will still never open.
Ran into one in the original release of Lego Harry Potter. Can't remember which game it was, but it was in the original release, before they combined them into one game. There was a hidden room you could access that you had to drop down into. To get out, you assembled a dragon skeleton, and then jumped on the skull. But if you accidentally hit the wall on the way up, it wouldn't bounce you high enough to get out. And if you tried again, it would only bounce you a small amount. You were basically stuck there. They eventually patched it out, but I remember I had to fully restart the game because of it. And it was later in the game, so it was a lot I had to redo.
Oh god the final fantasy 3d remakes had several soft locking bugs in it. Severly savage bugs that just re doing dialogs activates old game states that soft lock you.
The Esbern wall bug didn't get me until I played the super mega ultimate platinum edition. I did, however, get the bug with him still in the cell 90% of the time without mods.
GTA4 for whatever reason the Windows Live save would just be like oops we forgot your save data and lost my entire saves and any backups not once or twice but three times I tried to play through GTA4. With years in between me trying because after the 2nd time I got so pissed to took a break. Tried again on Steam a 4th time and it happened... again... I'll never beat GTA4.
Ps2 San Andreas save got corrupted. Had to start all over. Now I always keep a backup save just in case. Not thrilled about games that give you one save slot. (Looking at you Pokemon)
There are undoubtedly hundreds of games out there that could have made this list, and we go with 2 Pokémon games and Skyrim? Repeating a franchise, really? Cmon guys, do a bit of research.
So my put in for the pokemon soft lock would really depend on if you have enough poke balls to catch a water type because you get the old rod so your not necessarily soft lock unless you can't fish and catch it that's my ted talk thank you for coming
As a gamer from yester year the worse feeling for me was always when I beat a really hard boss or level or simply put in alot of Time in a game and turned off the console and forgot to save 😂. Sorry kids, that was before hard drives, and check points being so numerous and auto saves werent even a thing. Next worse was when id play through Resident evil and not have enough ammo to defeat a boss, or getting to a boss with very little health. I remember fighting virgils brother in Devil May Cry and it took me nearly 3 hours because I barely had health so I had to be nearly perfect to beat him.
Playing Morrowind and not saving for hours.
@lazrustosadow5880 Lol that's that hurt. I remember playing that on original Xbox.
Blackout wiped my save after hours of collecting treasure charts in Wind Waker back in the day. I never touched it again.
Still beats having limited lives and continues.
I remember my brother getting mad at me and he took my memory card out of of my ps1 and smashed it. Broke my fucking heart.
Many Sierra Online games also allowed you to save in the middle of an action you were performing, such as walking... So if the destination of your walk is a place you'll get killed, and you saved in the middle of that walking action, restoring it becomes similar to the endless loop of death in the first Doctor Strange movie, but with no way out of it.
The German Magikarp softlock is infamous, but I didn't know about the Mr. Briney glitch. There's also a very situational softlock in Red, Blue and Green. We're your only pokemon is a Graveler with self-destruct and explosion for its only offensive moves.
I forget it is/was a program or hardware bug for a ten year old game, but "Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth" would glitch and then "Failed To Load" for the rest of that cartridge. Finally learned about the possibility to exchange with Nin or download... after Nin had ended all support for the 3/DS servers:(
The Rage Quit is real, when this happens 🤬
The glitch has been fixed, but there was a nasty one in RockBand 3. During the campaign, you were sometimes able to choose a set of songs, or single song, to play at a venue. If you were presented with a band whose name had more than 32 characters in it, unless you finished that set, when you came back your entire save file would be corrupted beyond repair. You didn't even need to play it; only be presented with it as one of your 3 choices. You were safe if you played any of the songs and got presented with a new setlist, but if you quit during that screen it was GG.
The reason for this is that the game didn't expect any band's name to be that long, so it would auto-save the last characters of it over other data in memory. Getting a new list would put everything back to normal, but in the first few weeks of release that bug was incredibly scary since nobody knew what caused it and it felt completely arbitrary.
This is why bounds-checking is important, kids. Buffer overflows are no joke. ...That bug is basically _exactly_ the HEARTBLEED bug inverted; instead of _reading_ chunks of memory adjacent to a buffer that it wasn't supposed to have access to (and sending the potentially-sensitive contents to your website visitors), RockBand's code was _writing_ data into the memory immediately adjacent to the artist-name field in the save file... and corrupting whatever data was *supposed* to be stored there, making for unreadable save data.
If there's any silver lining on this, it's that developers HAVE started to learn from the literally thousands of buffer overflow bugs that have cropped up in released software. Any reasonable dev team's standard for C code will be that they're required to always perform fixed-size writes to fixed-size memory areas. If your save data stores artist names in a 32-byte buffer, then you don't say "write the_name to save.artist_name", you say "write the first 32 bytes of the_name to save.artist_name". Doesn't matter if the_name is "always" smaller than 32 bytes. (That's fine, then it will still always fit!) Doesn't matter if you always make sure to check first. (In fact, don't waste time checking, because if you just always do fixed-size writes then there's no REASON to check.) You just shut up and do it the safe way, every time. Turns out, we can be taught! Only taken 4 decades and counting... 🙄
Additionally with Code Veronica, by proxy with the metal detector, if you put the wrong item in the 3D printer, it will lock all your progress
I made the mistake of putting the metal case inside before checking it, and destroyed whatever enthusiasm I had for it
I have both versions of Bubble Bobble Revolution :3 It’s such a piece of history worth seeing yourself! 🤣
The worst save glitch I've ever had was in Far Cry 2. When you make it to the second map You have to park the truck in the garage. If you park it too far over it can force you to spawn in the back of the truck. And because it's in a garage YOU CANT GET OUT OF THE TRUCK AT ALL... And unfortunately I had only the auto save because of how it's saved worked. And I saved manually in the truck because I've had crashes in the garage...
Shoutout to Golo the Gamebreaker in the original Wii release of TLoZ Skyward Sword. If you talk to him at the wrong time your game will get locked. They even made a special Wii Channel to let you fix your save if this happened to you.
There was also a sofllock in Metroid Other M. If you backtracked after unlocking a certain door, the door would relock and never open again, so you had to start over or send your SD card to Nintendo so they could fix your save.
I've encountered bugs in Skyrim a time or two
Like dragons flinging all over the place
And characters either forgetting what they're doing, or stopping mid sentance and softlocking your progress
For me it was the Arcwind Point word wall quest. Still tons and tons of walls to find but the quest line where the greybeards tell you the location never progressed. So then it’s just if ya find one, ya find one. If not? Oh well.
I had the entire College quest softlock by simply not progressing after Winterhold got attacked. No ruin for you. No Staff of Magnus.
I could listen to Jess all day, I love her voice
Not a soft-lock, but in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, I managed to fall between time and space in Cosmo Canyon 😅. There is an icon called the Abandoned Ship, I believe, and is a ship that is stranded on some rocks. You're supposed to use one of the wind machines given throughout Cosmo Canyon to land on it, but in one of my attempts, I missed and instead landed on the rocks propping the ship up. I landed between a crevice and...whoops, now I'm in the void! The way the map glitched, I was kind of sent to another section of CC though I was still in a void (I could see a few assets from another area). I figured I could fast-travel back to the main village, but couldn't, the option of fast travel wouldn't appear. I tried to use the world map to fast travel elsewhere and couldn't. I wasn't sure when I had last saved but I realized I couldn't get myself out, so I reset. Thankfully, I guess I had saved it not long before then and I hadn't done anything important before I fell through the game, so I didn't lose any progress. But to this day, I'm wary about that abandoned ship.
There's some other light bugs that Square Enix haven't yet addressed with the Dustbowl colliseum, too. I'm watching someone else play the game for the first time and there's a bug where the enemies in this arena will wait about thirty seconds before attacking you. It does mean that you get some free hits in but it's weird when you begin the battle and the enemy just stands there...menacingly 😅
Summoner 1 on the ps2, there is a glitch that hits about 15 hours into the game where an event is supposed to happen on the world map to progress it pulls you seemingly randomly from the world map into an area. the games system flag to check if the event will spawn happens within minutes after starting a new game, so if the game decides not to spawn the event you won't know until you need the event to spawn, 15 hours into the game... restart and pray is all you can do... thank you devs for 10 hours of running around in game and weeks trying to find out what happened
You can still fight other pokemon with the fishing rod and make magikarp evolve and then learn surf
Physics games like Portal must be a nightmare to do QA for, I just realized. Needing to think outside the box to accomodate for how the players will think can't be easy and hence many ways of needing to save the player from themselves, lol. I've never played a Portal game, but they do look fun.
Another soft lock can be found in the Wii version of the first Skylanders game. In the later half of the game, upon completing the Quiksilver Vault, you will be asked if you want to proceed to the next level, Arkeyan Armory. Here you HAVE TO say yes. Otherwise, the game soft locks you out of proceeding.
@11:45 I'm legitimately shocked by that one. It's generally easier to just have 2 copies of the NPC, one on each side of a ferry... rather than require the game to track the position of a NPC for no reason.
I am currently replaying Twilight Princess atm and had no idea about this glitch so thankyou so much for the heads up
I legitimately thought that my inability to defeat the final boss in Twinsanity was either a skill issue or minor glitch. Nope, the game can just randomly despawn the grappling hook.
I'm reminded of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within... there's a chance where if you get the Water Sword on your way to get the good ending, the door to the final boss will refuse to open. If you saved just before it, the door will still never open.
Ran into one in the original release of Lego Harry Potter. Can't remember which game it was, but it was in the original release, before they combined them into one game. There was a hidden room you could access that you had to drop down into. To get out, you assembled a dragon skeleton, and then jumped on the skull. But if you accidentally hit the wall on the way up, it wouldn't bounce you high enough to get out. And if you tried again, it would only bounce you a small amount. You were basically stuck there. They eventually patched it out, but I remember I had to fully restart the game because of it. And it was later in the game, so it was a lot I had to redo.
The Esbern fire wall bug can be fixed by waiting a few hours
In-game hours or real life hours?
@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley in game
The Viewtiful Joe 2 demo back in the day. Then when i got the card in the mail letting me know that my memory cards were wiped, that was a fun time
Oh god the final fantasy 3d remakes had several soft locking bugs in it. Severly savage bugs that just re doing dialogs activates old game states that soft lock you.
Assassins Creed Valhalla & GTA Remastered corrupted both of my save files
The notorious sibling erasing the file off the ps1 or 2memory card
The Esbern wall bug didn't get me until I played the super mega ultimate platinum edition. I did, however, get the bug with him still in the cell 90% of the time without mods.
Oblivion also has a soft lock in the Mage's Guild.
GTA4 for whatever reason the Windows Live save would just be like oops we forgot your save data and lost my entire saves and any backups not once or twice but three times I tried to play through GTA4. With years in between me trying because after the 2nd time I got so pissed to took a break. Tried again on Steam a 4th time and it happened... again... I'll never beat GTA4.
At least the one good thing is knowing that some of the mentioned glitches are fully avoidable.
*Skyrim*
two words:
console commands
Honorable Mention: FF Tactics - Wiegraf/Belias fight
I was able to fix the Alduin wall glitch by putting a torch in Delphine's inventory.
Fallout 3 goty edition will hard lock after you walk out of megaton with auto save on
I got hit by the skyrim and the portal 2 blocks.
I'm a one save to rule them all person 😂
My wife is the 500 different saves person
Ps2 San Andreas save got corrupted. Had to start all over. Now I always keep a backup save just in case. Not thrilled about games that give you one save slot. (Looking at you Pokemon)
6 save files is the perfect amount.
Never trust any fish
I remember FFVII my 3rd&4th disk were scratched by my baby brother. I never finished!
Probably the reason why they are called bosses
MGSV, taking quiet out on certain missions would take down the game.
There are undoubtedly hundreds of games out there that could have made this list, and we go with 2 Pokémon games and Skyrim? Repeating a franchise, really?
Cmon guys, do a bit of research.
WWF No Mercy on the N64 would wipe your entire save at random
I rage quit on Code Veronica 😠
Nice
Didn’t experience the VIP card but in Origami King or Mr. Dewford.
The time I lost my entire PS3 collection’s game progress because the backup options were confusingly worded 🤨.
A soft lock means it’s nearly possibly get out, but you are able to get out of it. A hard lock is the one where you must leave the game.
Sometimes I blame the game.
First comment 😁👍
So my put in for the pokemon soft lock would really depend on if you have enough poke balls to catch a water type because you get the old rod so your not necessarily soft lock unless you can't fish and catch it that's my ted talk thank you for coming
That early in gen 3 you couldnt use surf outside of battle or find it. Ya couldnt surf till ya got badge 5 and that spot is gym 2.