Poll of the Day > What are some examples in games where you can un-fail a mission?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Technically speaking this just means the devs included a fake failure state... still

I think the most well known case of this is the alternate start of A51 in Perfect Dark, where you can use an alternate explosive to turn the failure state back into an 'incomplete'

Technically the game didn't have to say anything... which is why I consider this an example of 'un-failing' a mission. Games like Skyrim and Witcher 3 sometimes have 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.

I'd say Prince of Persia and other games with a rewind feature like Braid etc count

Maybe Last Stand in Call of Duty?

Far-Queue posted...

I'd say Prince of Persia and other games with a rewind feature like Braid etc count

Maybe Last Stand in Call of Duty?

those games don't tend to maintain a mission/quest log... But I haven't played the old Call of Dutys so I don't know

I based by answer off of the notion of a "fake failure state"

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.

Whelp, for the BIG list:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FissionMailed

My favorites:

• In Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, there's a scene where Guybrush is suspended over a cauldron filled with acid. If you take too long to get out, Guybrush falls into the acid and dies only to be reminded that he can't die in a story he himself is in the middle of telling.

• In Death Road to Canada, if every human member of your party dies but you have dogs still alive, you will receive a message saying that your journey has ended. The next dialogue box, however, reveals that the dogs have taught themselves how to drive, and the game will continue.

Many, many times in the Ace Attorney series:

• In the first game of all:
• In the fourth case, with the Game Over sequence, the only indication that you're supposed to let the Guilty verdict continue is that you weren't penalized. In fact, if you haven't been penalized at all, it will seem very weird, as the judge doesn't give you another chance, and you don't lose one of your markers. Also, the fact that you can't do anything to prevent the supposed Game Over. For someone playing through the first time, these vague indications are very easily overlooked. Unless you've failed before. One indicator is that, during the Judge's typical spiel, it cuts to Wright, who sweats and says something like "This doesn't look good... I'm sorry...".

Idk if this counts, but something kind of happens in Just Shapes and Beats. In that game, during one of the final boss fights, you have nowhere to go except in the bosss mouth. While you are in there, he chomps and kills you. It gives you the normal Game Over screen. Which is a screen with the words Its Over about you crushed body. After a normal Game Over, you keep pressing the button until your body puts itself back together, and the word NOT appears so it says, Its NOT Over. And you do that here Then the boss comes out of nowhere and curbs stomps you

After that, your friends cry over you and then the square friends uses his cat ear defibrillator to bring you back to life. But thats afterwards

I mean, Fission Mailed is a classic meme for a reason.

SomeUsername529 posted...

I mean, Fission Mailed is a classic meme for a reason.

I don't wanna say all of yous are wrong... cuz you're not, you are all right

It's just that I was looking for something specifically related to questlogs and I don't think I expressed that well enough.

In Metal Gear Solid 3 you have to let yourself die to defeat a boss

minor SPOILERS for MGS3

If you die during the fight(the fight is just you walking down a river after a ghost, while the ghosts of every enemy youve killed in the game tries to attack you) its game over, but if you reach a certain point in the fight youre supposed to just lie down in the water and let yourself drown.

You get your typical game over screen but theres a new option to revive yourself using a capsule or something that you get at the beginning of the game.

The levequests in FFXIV. Sure, there are the duties too that you can fail and try again, but that is different as the game treats it like "It didn't really happen. Try again." The levequests, however, take up allowances with every attempt, allowances you earn every twelve hours of real time, and it appears in your questlog. You can fail those leves in a number of ways, but, as long as you don't drop the leves, you can pour more allowances into them to try again.

This is actually how people used to farm an item--one that came from coffers--during Heavensward when it came time to do the Anima relic grind. Start leve, seek chest, grab item if available, abandon without dropping so you don't have to go back to town, and try again until you're either bored or out of allowances.