LogFAQs > #965165840

When I read the topic title, the first thing I thought of was less a specific mission unfailing, as much as a mission chain.

Some of the Wing Commander games had a few points where if you failed a mission, you'd be shunted into a "failure" track, where you'd keep getting missions, but they'd lead to a bad ending. Kind of giving you the illusion that you were doing well, when you'd already locked yourself into the bad ending by screwing up at the wrong time.

Fortunately, there was usually at least one or two opportunities to do well in specific missions in the failure track that would allow you to slip back into the main mission track. Kind of representing the idea that you'd lost a battle and were forced into a retreat and you were losing ground in the war, but then you fought well enough to recover and regain the advantage.



Lokarin posted...

Games like Skyrim and Witcher 3 sometimes ave alternate threads to conclude a quest... but (so far) neither will take a quest that is registered as 'failed' and give you a chance to un-fail it.

Witcher 3 does have a weird situation where you basically "glitch" the ending of a major quest, though. I forget exactly how, but there's a way to complete the Bloody Baron questline in a way that it technically fails and succeeds simultaneously. Or more specifically, when you're forced to essentially choose whether to save the kids or save the Baron's wife, you can break the game and trick it into assuming you did both. It's kind of obvious that it's not just an alternate solution though, as much as the game not knowing how to process the conflicting event flags properly.

Fallout 4 has something similar - in the normal course of events, whatever faction you side with will generally wipe out the others (or, at least, the other factions will automatically go hostile once you permanently choose a side). The Institute will force you to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel and the Railroad, the Railroad will have you destroy the Institute and the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood will attack the Railroad and the Institute (The Minutemen are the only faction that gets along with everyone, and won't go hostile unless you play the Nuka-Cola DLC and become a raider). But if you kill Father the first time you reach the Institute, it essentially autofails every faction's questlines, shunts you into the Minutemen ending, and skips you over almost the entirety of "Act III" (a ton of quests and probably 10+ hours worth of gameplay). But it also prevents the Railroad and Brotherhood from going hostile (the only possible ending where you can keep both friendly), so you can beat the main story having three factions on your side with only one dead.

Neither of those are exactly failed missions that you can turn into successes, but they do sort of straddle the grey area between success and failure.