An issue is that even a Game-Breaking Bug is not necessarily omnipresent, it's something that does exist in the game but players may not encounter it unless they play it 10 times over (and sometimes gets patched later on so new players won't ever encounter it). And that's a similar premise with UBM. The thing is that most examples are not "game shuts down and you have to completely uninstall, reinstall and start from scratch in order to get past that point" but are on the line of "this shouldn't be an issue but it forces you to manually reload the save point/level/game to get the right progression triggers."
And that is where I think UBI is distinct, as it is players who diverge from the gameplay path or intentionally trying to jack up the game mechanics that they find themselves in a similar "force you to restart the save point/level/game" situation. As the wick check seems to be panning out, it's more about player behavior than about the glitch itself.
Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I would say that this is true of both Unwinnable by Insanity and Unwinnable by Mistake. Just look at the illustrative example given in the description: a player leaving a key-item behind unintentionally, then progressing beyond a Point of No Return, thus soft-locking themselves.
This is still caused by player-behaviour, but it's player-behaviour that's fairly reasonable for the developer to foresee, one might argue. Thus it falls into "mistake", rather than "insanity".
I still hold that, ultimately, both centre around player-behaviour, but that the difference is in whether it's reasonable for the developer to have predicted that people would so behave (or reasonable for the developer to think it worth fixing).
However, I should perhaps look for actual evidence for that. So, after my work today, I think that I'll start wick-checking Unwinnable by Mistake, in particular looking to see whether I'm correct in thinking that it likewise has a focus on the player's sequence of actions.
[edit] A wick-check has (barely) begun, here: Wick Check By Mistake
[edit 2] I've made some progress, although it's not yet reflected in the sandbox.
So far there are a lot of entries focussing on the events as bugs/design choices, although there is a distinct set that focus on player actions.
That said, there are quite a few entries yet to go!
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 9th 2021 at 10:02:00 PM
My Games & Writing
Okay, my wick-check is done! (Presuming that I did it correctly.)
The full results are on the sandbox page, here
.
However, the short version is thus:
Of 50 wicks checked, and granted that this is filtered through my interpretation of the wording give, I came to the following counts:
- Unclear: 1
- Internal reference, not example: 1
- Bug: 21
- Game Design: 10
- Player Action: 22
From this, I conclude that the trope is more or less evenly used from the perspective of the issue stemming from the game being buggy, and from the perspective of the issue stemming from the player performing certain actions.
There's also a small but notable sub-set of wicks in which it's used from the perspective of the issue stemming from game design.
My Games & Writing
Lost in Space
Have we checked for overlaps between Unwinnable by Insanity and Unwinnable by Mistake?
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
I'm still working on mine. After that we can try and find overlap. My check has a category for it.
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
Alright. Wick Check By Insanity is done:
- VideoGame.Eternal Darkness: One player found a means to soft-lock the game by saving directly after skipping a cutscene in Edwin Lindsey's chapter, which the Japanese version of the game subsequently patched. The timing on this is so small that it's also an fairly insane decision to make. This is a UBM example but references UBI in the pothole, discussing how the players would have to be "fairly insane" to do this.
- YMMV.Baba Is You:
- In older versions of the game, by going well out of one's way to ignore the puzzle and assemble contradictory rules, it was possible to create an unresolvable loop that crashed the game in Chasm-Extra 3, "Broken". Later versions patched this out by recognizing the loopnote and making it an in-universe Reality-Breaking Paradox that can be backed out of normally.
- In level Depths-03, "Crushers", it's possible to turn the level into a stack of over two thousand objects, which will cause the Depths map screen to throw a "Too Complex!" error every time it is entered from then on.
- YMMV.Chess: Underpromotion allows for this. If a player underpromotes to a knight or a bishop in a king and pawn vs. king endgame, the game is immediately unwinnable (ends in a draw), because there are no possible moves to checkmate the king.
- YMMV.Crypt Of The Necro Dancer: The game was purposefully designed in such a way that good players could always progress and win a round, and this can be done with almost no equipment. Left your shovel behind or intentionally destroyed it? You don't really need it, either the exit will always be reachable without having to dig any tiles, or in the case of Zone 4 you can just punch individual dirt tiles down. It's even possible to go through zones without a weapon, using equipment such as Boots of Pain, Fireball Spell, Earth Spell, or just plain old bombs to damage bosses and minibosses. However, there is one special case: If you somehow get rid of your irreplaceable starting weapon as Aria, which would require you to throw your dagger and either not pick it up before leaving the weapon or destroying it, your run is eventually doomed, since the final boss is immune to all damage sources except your starting dagger. You really need to go out of your way to accomplish this, and there's no reward for it.
- YMMV.Conan Hyborian Age: The rusted weapons you need to find to complete the quest of reforging them aren't hard to identify (you only need one of them out of three, the first one you pick up advances the quest diary, and two of them are lying in noticeable places where you must go to procede, making them impossible to miss), but they aren't technically considered as quest items, so you can drop them in unreachable places, store them in respawnable containers, sell them... References why the game allows this, but makes it about doing it.
- YMMV.Factorio: If the map is of limited size, the total amount of ore is limited, making it possible to exhaust it completely before launching the rocket and making the map unwinnable. However, one has to deliberately try to do that by some combination of lowering the resource amount, deliberately wasting resources or turning on expensive and/or marathon mode. Later versions of the game allow for a functionally infinite map size, however, with resource deposits becoming richer and richer as you expand outwards. Talking about how players need to deliberately set up this scenario.
- YMMV.Maniac Mansion: Some ways to lose are near impossible to foresee, but others require you to take a very specific set of sadistic or outright stupid missteps right at the start:
- Find the house key under the doormat, then ring the doorbell to summon Weird Ed, and get captured after he shuts and locks the front door. This leaves you trapped in the dungeon, and the remaining two characters will be unable to get into the mansion.
- Call the Meteor Police (with Bernard) too many times, and they won't come any more. Depending on your third character, this may or may not be unwinnable.
- With Syd/Razor: Send in obvious failure versions of the tape: a blank tape, a broken record, or a tentacle mating call. Send in your own demo tape instead of Green Tentacle's to understandably infuriate him. With Wendy: Send in anything that's not the corrected manuscript. With Michael: Expose the film before developing it.
- YMMV.Middens: You can murder the Love Bus driver, but if the door is closed, you'll be trapped inside the bus with no way out unless you commit suicide (if you even can). The creator himself even warns you that this is a bad idea.
- YMMV.Rainbow Six Siege: Rather notably, Plane has a hallway on the bottom floor that is fully sealed off on all sides by destructible walls. It is entirely possible for a team to trap themselves inside this hallway by blasting a hole into the hallway, get everybody in, then reinforcing all the walls from the inside, effectively giving the round to the enemy as they are now stuck in a metal box with no way to get out.
- YMMV.Pokemon Go: The Permanence limiter makes functions overload whenever you uninstall them. An insane player might try to use this to overload all of their functions, but functions start uninstalling normally again when you're down to your last four. There are only three functions in the game that are completely incapable of dealing damage in their base form... but with the Recursion copies of those functions it is possible to make sure that your last four functions can't deal damage. Since the game uses a profile system for saves, leaving this state requires restoring a manual backup.
- YMMV.Stick Ranger: It is possible to sell all your weapons and then blow all your money, making it impossible to fight bosses to progress in the game or gain any new weapons.
- YMMV.Strife: The Permanence limiter makes functions overload whenever you uninstall them. An insane player might try to use this to overload all of their functions, but functions start uninstalling normally again when you're down to your last four. There are only three functions in the game that are completely incapable of dealing damage in their base form... but with the Recursion copies of those functions it is possible to make sure that your last four functions can't deal damage. Since the game uses a profile system for saves, leaving this state requires restoring a manual backup.
- YMMV.Transistor: The Permanence limiter makes functions overload whenever you uninstall them. An insane player might try to use this to overload all of their functions, but functions start uninstalling normally again when you're down to your last four. There are only three functions in the game that are completely incapable of dealing damage in their base form... but with the Recursion copies of those functions it is possible to make sure that your last four functions can't deal damage. Since the game uses a profile system for saves, leaving this state requires restoring a manual backup.
- YMMV.Zombie Survival: On certain maps, it's possible to throw objective-required items into hazardous and/or out of reach areas such as zombie spawns. There's also intentionally breaking props as a human for reasons other than denying them to wraiths and shades. Talking about things players do intentionally.
- YMMV.Shogun Total War: You can wait out for the last turn without completing your objectives, or have your daimyo with no heir fight a battle with no chance to escape.
- VideoGame.Kan Colle: Unwinnable by Design: Ship locking when it was first introduced in summer 2014. Sent too many ships to AL/MI, or just didn't have enough ships to spare for the last map? Chances are you won't be able to clear the last map. Last maps have been much more lenient since then, however; only Summer 2015 posed any problem if you locked all your important ships to E-5, which shouldn't even happen considering the ships you would need to clear up to E5 to begin with, unless you sank or scrapped all of them.
- YMMV.Street Pass Mii Plaza: If you use Pink magic against a Green Slime, every single physical attack you make will miss. Since Green Slimes can only be harmed by physical attacks, failure will be your only option unless you know that Orange magic can overpower Pink magic.
- YMMV.Pokemon Crystal Clear: While this is averted for common soft-lock targets such as Cinnabar Island, it's possible to render the game unwinnable by using the Laptop and releasing your HM users in a right spot to get rid of any chance to escape.
- YMMV.Ancient Domains Of Mystery: The Pyramid and Minotaur Maze both close up once you reach a certain level (17 for the Pyramid, 31 for the maze). Anything inside is Permanently Missable once they close. If you drop one of the Chaos Orbs, leave, and then gain that level, the orb will be irretrievable. However, this is nigh-impossible to do unintentionally.
- YMMV.Half Life Opposing Force: Early in the game, there's a section where you need to use a firearm to blow up some explosives to clear some debris that's blocking a power loader from moving. If you somehow arrive here with no ammo for any of your weapons, it becomes impossible to progress the game. The game does give you a grenade and a mag of desert eagle rounds just before this room, but if you fire these at random into nothing for whatever reason, you're basically stuck.
- YMMV.Final Fantasy Adventure:
- Yes, it is somehow possible to save your game with 1 HP and being poisoned. You reload the game and end up dying, with no other remedy other than to restart your game.
- Saving while riding Chocobot on a screen with only water and then dying or turning off the game. Since you always start the game dismounted, the game will crash if you try to load from here as there is nowhere for the player character to stand.
- YMMV.Dynamite Headdy: In the level Toyz N' the Hood, you have to catch a nearby platform to be able to climb a wall. As seen here, if you bring the platform too far away from the ledge or the other platform, you won't be able to continue. You can't move the platform again, and, provided you killed the only enemy around, you can't kill yourself, forcing you to reset the game.
- Characters.Homestuck Cherubs: Because Caliborn killed Calliope's dream self, the session is considered one-player, and is therefore a "dead session." In Sburb, this is basically the worst thing ever. I don't know full context, but this sounds like it fits here.
- Anime.Carnival Phantasm: During Episode 4, the Neco Arcs are playing Fate/Stay Night... and reaching this bad ending. That specific bad end is considered by the game itself to be among the hardest bad endings to get, as it requires playing very specifically to piss Saber off as much as possible. The Neco Arcs complain that "the choices are too difficult".
- YMMV.Exit Fate: After reaching Blackwater for the first time, you can sell all your equipment and use all money you have now to buy consumables, then waste them, and you'll be permanently stuck in a town where you're required to rest at an inn, but don't have the money to do so.
- YMMV.Dyson Sphere Program: There's currently no way to restore bodies of water that were filled in with foundations, but water is a vital component in some pivotal mid-game recipes. If you somehow managed to pave over your entire planet before researching the upgrades necessary to travel to other worlds, you're SOL. This is unlikely, however, both because of the insane amount of resources you'd need to craft so much foundation space, and because it's simply not even remotely necessary no matter how messy your initial factory setup got.
- YMMV.X: Put only five energy cells in your cargo bay and fire the Unfocused Jumpdrive. Then blow up the crate of energy cells the devs stuck in the random sector for exactly that eventuality. You are now trapped Go D-only-knows-where with no way back home.
- YMMV.Papo And Yo: The PC version, released in April 2013, was a huge improvement over the original. It had practically every audio/video option you could want out of a PC game, as well as sharpened graphics, the ironing out of many Game Breaking Bugs (some were left in, but they bordered on Unwinnable by Insanity), a silky-smooth framerate and excellent keyboard & mouse controls as well as supporting an Xbox 360 gamepad.
- YMMV.Guacamelee: Or more likely due to ignorance and the lack of game restrictions when it comes to exploring. You can already gain access to the Caverna del Pollo if you have Olmec's Headbutt to destroy the yellow block. The Dashing Derpderp is also required to clear the blue block before the third set of floors. What the game doesn't tell you about the third set of enemy waves is that there is an enemy with a purple barrier than can only be destroyed using the chicken's egg bomb ability (obtained from getting silver medals on El Infierno challenges). You can still beat said enemy if you have the Intenso upgrade that instantly breaks enemy shields. If you don't even have that Intenso upgrade, there's no way that you could beat this purple-shielded mook no matter what you try. Fortunately, the player can just simply exit the game and be teleported back to the nearest checkpoint, but at the expense of losing any newly-collected coins from that unsaved run. Might also count as UBM
- YMMV.Illbleed: Averted in Stage 4, by design. You need to have $200,000 to enter the toy aisles of the department store, but even if you deliberately blew all your money before entering the stage and then wasted as much of it as possible on the stage's traps, there's no way to get stuck at this point: You're given the $150,000 prize up-front, there aren't enough money-stealing traps to take more than $50,000 away from you, and there's an extra $100,000 in a hidden vault just before you reach the toy aisles.
- YMMV.Boiling Point Road To Hell: Averted. If you shoot a plot-essential quest giver in the face, he'll respawn good as new the next time you revisit the area (although you'll probably need to repair your faction standing before he'll talk to you). In fact several faction missions involve base assaults that almost always result in the death of the opposing faction's quest givers.
- YMMV.Hexen: The secret level sacred grove requires you to kill ettins quickly. If the number of ettins exceed 20, infinite groups of chaos serpants will spawn and overwhelm the player. While death normally resets the level to the beginning or last save, it's a terminal state for co-op play (where all players have to loaf around the small arena without attacking or fleeing the map) that requires restarting the game.
- YMMV.Rune Factory: In the first two games, if you save deep in a dungeon while both poisoned and sealed, you can find yourself unable to get out before the poison kills you. Later games fix this both by allowing the Escape spell to work even while sealed, and by reducing the penalty for fainting in a dungeon from an instant Game Over to a massive hospital bill. Doesn't reference player action, and sounds like a potential mistake because it had to be patched.
- YMMV.Monkey Island 2 Le Chucks Revenge: Early versions allowed Guybrush to get the 6000 pieces of eight needed to hire Kate Capsize one at a time by polishing the peg leg of one of the Men of Low Moral Fiber.note Doing this bypassed learning the trick to winning the spitting contest, which was later needed to escape from a death trap. The special edition fixes this by capping the number of pieces of eight Guybrush could earn this way far, far lower. Judging by how it was later fixed, this is obviously a mistake.
- Fanfic.Nymerias War: Albin Manwoody is a dangerous man for sure, yet in his madness, he has bit of more than he could ever chew, by declaring war on four powerful kingdoms at once, three of which form an alliance to crush him and making his victory look as good as impossible. Pothole used in the wrong context, describing a character who can't win because he put himself in a bad situation.
- RealLife.Tropes T To Z: If your Sanity or Intelligence stat is low, you have little or no chance of levelling-up. Also true to a lesser extent if your Charisma stat is low. Referring to literal insanity and stupidity.
- YMMV.Banjo Tooie: : As Washing Machine Banjo, it's possible to trap yourself in Grunty Industries (specifically at the bottom of the Air Conditioning Plant).
- YMMV.Comet Busters: A 2-player Tournament Mode game with no rocks, non-deadly bullets, and neither player has a shield is impossible to conclude in any way but a draw. How so, and why would people do this?
- YMMV.Slay The Spire: It is possible to exhaust or remove your entire deck and have nothing to play, leaving you only able to end turn until your enemy put you out of your misery. Not entirely a ZCE, but doesn't have enough context to know how a player would be able to do this or how easy it is to do.
- YMMV.Who Is This Git: Basically the premise behind his "How To Get Game Over" Pokémon series. If it's like Pikasprey's "Soft Lock Picking" series, it's about him intentionally getting into these scenarios, however the lack of context puts it here.
- GoodBadBugs.Role Playing Game: Final Fantasy V: There is a major Sequence Breaking glitch in the game where, if you save early in the game, play until the Floating Continent without saving, hop back on the airship from the Floating Continent, go back to the Continent, and die, you'll wake up right at the beginning of the game with your airship. This allows you to skip everything between leaving Narshe and finding the unconscious Terra in Zozo, while having a party consisting of Locke and Terra. Various applications of this glitch allow you to turn Relm and Strago into Ghosts and have them one-shot the final boss with Possess, or add General Leo or Maduin to your party, or take Banon to the World of Ruin, and then turn the World of Ruin back into a glitchy version of the World of Balance with WoR towns through triggering Kefka's invasion of Figaro... Or you can have Banon sing at the opera, causing his sprite to glitch out explosively. This glitch went undiscovered for over ten years before anyone caught it, but considering what has to be done to trigger it, it's no wonder it wasn't caught.
- YMMV.Metroid Prime 2 Echoes: * Unwinnable by Insanity: If you use Sequence Breaking to bypass the area where Samus loses her gear, that's fine and dandy, but do not go back to that area afterwards unless you can glitch out of it again. The scene will play, and any gear obtained since then will be lost. Already obtained that gear? Well, you can't get any more of it. Doesn't make it clear why or how someone would do this.
- VideoGame.Cobra Mission: "Any possible cases of Unwinnable by Insanity were prevented. There is no Point of No Return, and you always can get enough money from Random Encounters."
- YMMV.Kings Quest IV The Perils Of Rosella: Eating or forgetting the magic fruit you were supposed to use to save your father's life. If you saved Genesta, she'll return you home in time to watch your father pass away. Doesn't explain if this has to be intentional.
- Loyalty Mission: Mass Effect has a primitive form of this. In particular, helping Wrex obtain his ancestral armor wins his loyalty enough that you can talk him down from potentially turning on you without needing a high enough Paragon or Renegade rank or putting yourself in a near-Unwinnable by Insanity position.
- So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: In New Mystery, triggering Samson or Sheena's Face–Heel Turn counts. If you've given them a Plot Coupon prior to this then...
Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 13th 2021 at 10:06:15 AM
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
...Bump?
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Ah, sorry!
Let's see... Based on a quick look at your wick-check, it seems that in current use, Unwinnable By Insanity is primarily viewed from the perspective of player-behaviour. Am I understanding that correctly?
My Games & Writing
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
Yup
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Okay, in that case it seems like usage, at least, aligns with it being a YMMV trope.
Based on the "insanity" wick-check, it doesn't look like there's much overlap from that end. I fear that I didn't check for this in the "mistake" wick-check! (Which—*ahem*—might have been a mistake. ;P)
Other than that... erm... I'm honestly not sure of quite where we left off... ^^;
I recall that there has been the suggestion of merging UBI and UBM, which would seem to obviate the question of YMMV.
On the other hand, it looks like there may be enough distinction in usage to keep the two separate.
Both UBI and UBM seem in their usage to include some degree of focus on player-action—especially in the "insanity" case. Thus, if they are kept separate, I remain content to have UBI be YMMV.
My Games & Writing
Gentleman Troper!
FWIW I concur with the idea of merging these two tropes. As I recall, years ago when they were split, there was already concern from the very beginning that UBI is simply The Same, but More of UBM. Looks like those concerns were justified, in retrospect.
Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!
Gentleman Troper!
Looking over the page and the recent wick checks underlines this issue.
The trope definition is "something no sane player would attempt in any conceivable gameplay". So there are two, conflicting, definitions of "insanity" at play.
On the one hand (and I think this is what the trope is intended for), you have examples like Monkey Island II. A slightly tedious action results in an NPC giving you one coin, and an item in a shop costs 6000 coins. Of course there is another way to get that amount of money, but it is technically possible for the player to spend hours and hours repeating that action 6000 times to get coins from the NPC (at least, until a bugfix blocked this). That's pretty ridiculous behavior though, and this clearly wouldn't come up normally.
On the other hand, there are examples like the prominent page image, or Chess ("promoting to a knight means you can't win") or King's Quest IV ("you can type 'eat fruit' after getting the fruit"). That's not smart, sure. But is it "are you INSANE?!?!" kind of non-smart? It's pretty easy to do accidentally, or to just try it to see what would happen. And also, the developer takes that into account. The actual trope here is Did Not Think This Through.
So yeah: on the one hand we have a player tediously spending about thirty hours on a repetitive task; on the other we have a player click the wrong button or make a tactically bad choice for a second. Clearly not the same thing.
I also note that a lot of these examples don't make the game unwinnable! "Unwinnable" means that you can keep playing but the end condition can no longer be reached; and none of the above examples match that! Getting to a losing position in Chess doesn't mean that the game is "unwinnable", it means you have lost the match. Mario 2 doesn't become unwinnable (you lose a life, then repeat the level), nor is KQ 4 (you get the bad ending), and nor does Monkey Island (it is possible but unlikely that you miss a vital item this way, but the trope for that is Point of No Return).
Feel free to cite me on that in TRS.
Edited by Spark9 on Mar 25th 2021 at 6:19:55 AM
Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!
You actually make a very valid point with that! It seems the term "unwinnable" has been skewed overtime to mean just "losing a game in general" rather than making the end goal nigh-impossible to achieve. It kinda borders on complaining. Not to mention that losing games is just... losing games, which isn't really noteworthy since nearly all games have implemented losing conditions by default.
Spark 9 makes a solid argument, I feel, and I'm inclined to support the idea of merging the two tropes!
(I would argue that a state in which the player can only lose is a state in which they cannot win, and thus an unwinnable state. However, that's a quibble, and not really relevant to my support for the merging.)
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 26th 2021 at 9:36:12 PM
My Games & Writing
So, shall we have a single-proposition crowner on merging UBI with UBM?
My Games & Writing
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
Like I said on the other thread, if you want to actually take action, you need TRS.
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Well, seems discussion has progressed in my absence.
Actually, in the case of the example, the match would end in a draw. The opponent cannot checkmate you with just a king, but it's literally impossible to checkmate a king with just your own king and a knight or a bishop. The game would, at the most, play out for 50 more moves, after which draw by 50-move rule would kick in. Generally, however, a draw is declared before that due to checkmate becoming impossible with lack of material on either side.
As promotion to queen is, with very few exceptions (as in, "game-winning underpromotions in professional play are often noted down for prosperity and studied due to the unusual circumstances behind them"), the best option, this would be a deliberately suboptimal move. You'd be hard-pressed to find even the newest of chess players pass up a queen for a much weaker piece.
Given the nature of the trope, however, I'd find it hard to consider a drawn chess match the same sort of "unwinnable" that losing a key item in a video game would be.
Besides that, I don't much care to argue what happens with the page one way or another, except that a merge between Unwinnable by Mistake and Unwinnable by Insanity would need a rename, given that many examples of Unwinnable by Insanity aren't necessarily oversights. Something like "Unintentionally Unwinnable" would probably do (as lack of intention doesn't necessarily indicate a mistake).
Edited by AGuy on Apr 3rd 2021 at 5:24:08 AM
I'm just.. a guy....
I do agree that a rename would likely be in order.
Ah, sorry! As I said in the other thread, that's my inexperience with this process showing! ^^;;
As with that other thread, I may start a TRS thread for this matter in due course (perhaps tomorrow), then! (Presuming that no-one else does so before me!)
Thank you again for correcting me. ^_^
My Games & Writing
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
No worries ![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_up_emoticon_3268.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
Why are you embedding examples in note tags anyway?
Rare autosaves add frustration but they do not make the game unwinnable. Rage quitting doesn't count.
Those DA:O items seem like this isn't a case of poor design but players intentionally doing stupid things, which... isn't a trope. Not really. Emergent player behavior is not something present in the game. I would assume that it is also possible to make a sports game unwinnable by trading all your good players and then standing there while the AI beats you, but that's not an oversight by the developers; that's just being an idiot.
Continuing is Painful is by design, so doesn't count. It's not UBI if the developers intended for it to be a mechanic, although it could very well be bad design.
Edited by Fighteer on Mar 8th 2021 at 10:52:17 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"