The problem I had was that I chose my major skills as the skills I thought I'd use the most, which I did. This meant that whenever I leveled, my minor skills had only increased by, say 2/3, compared to 10 among my majors. Not only that, but my major skills were governed by at least 4 attributes. The end result was that the maximum I could ever increase an attribute was by 2, and usually only by 1.

I love death scenes in P&C adventures!!! They're fun! They aren't pointless, they're harmless! Their point is to emphasize "you didn't do it right! try again!" and they are often done in fun ways that add to the level of ridicule or frustration you feel. Rex Nebular has some of the funnest deaths. Phantasmagoria was made to show the death-scenes! Stasis adds to the morbidity with their death scenes. They're harmless creative deaths. I love a good death. Bring me the solution I need, or bring me fun death!

Not really, no. It was pretty much only the old-school Sierra games that had this issue. Most adventure games from the 2000s and beyond fixed this by not letting you exit a certain area or progress through the day/chapter until you'd found and completed everything you needed to.

In most classics I think you really have to mess up your character by several very bad decisions to maneuver yourself into an unwinnable state though, at least on Normal difficulty. However, I nearly had to abort my playthrough of Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption at one point, because one boss was next to impossible to defeat without a certain spell that you get from a spellbook you find, and I had allowed one of my companions to learn it instead of learning it myself, only to find out that this companion was removed from my party a while after, before the boss battle. It wasn't a combination of very bad decisions over the course of the game that got me into this tight spot, it was just one single decision that didn't seem so bad at first and that I was never warned about. I wouldn't have replayed the game for that, to me this is still an example of bad design and not something that makes this RPG more challenging and exciting. I don't remember how I resolved the issue though; maybe I was still able to reload an earlier save, or I found a cheat, not sure.

Reminds me of the time I managed to reach Hell difficulty with my barbarian in Diablo 2. I was still in the first act and it was going kinda well. That is, until I came across a named monster that was, if I remember correctly, immune to physical and had stone skin. And this with my barbarian without so much as a whimper of a magical attack. I effectively couldn't damage it at all. I thought of hiring a henchman and getting it to my level, which I imagine would've been the easiest. But instead I figured that was enough Diablo 2 for this lifetime :P

"The Mist" text adventure had some pretty "unconventional" death scenes, albeit text-only. I remember having my father try the game because he was a Stephen King fan. He just thought the object of the game was just to die odd deaths--I guess an early death simulator game!


As for dead man walking situations, they can be real annoying depending on how much time gets sunk before finding out, but on the whole I look at it like a maze. Sometimes there are corridors that go on for a long while before you realize it's a dead end. I usually am ok with it since it prolongs the game's playability--but when I do get pissed, I'll send the game to an extended "time out" corner! :-)

I think these situations where I'm not allowed to backtrack to do something I previously missed are the total opposite of good game design. I feel like more often than not they're a mistake the developers let slip by than a deliberate design choice.
I may be tolerant of these in classic games but if I ran into one of these in modern games that's the number 1 reason for quitting the game right there. It's unacceptable nowadays and super frustrating.

The game I am thinking of, Wizardry 4, does provide some indication. Specifically, on the second level, if you explore it thoroughly, you will find the gates to hell. This is *not* something you will miss, and even if you can't make it there, the encounters near there are suspicious.

Note that you can't actually do anything at that spot when you first reach it; you need to backtrack. Fortunately, there is a warning right before the point of no return (as I mentioned earlier), and actually getting back to the bottom of the dungeon before that point is just a single cast of MALOR. (Getting back up has to be done manually, however.)

It is worth noting that Wizardry 4 expects you to thoroughly map each floor; there is, in fact, a puzzle whose solution involves a certain detail you might notice if you map everything.

By the way, for this topic, Wizardry 4 is best treated as an adventure game rather than an RPG; there aren't any character or party builds, and you don't have much control over combat anyway.

Sounds like horrible game design.
None of the more recent adventures I've played (mostly from Wadjeteye's games...Blackwell series, Resonance, Techonbabylon etc.) had such design...and I'm really glad about that.

Old Sierra games had this problem sometimes but not Lucasarts.

My earliest experience with this scenario however was in Return to Zork; when either pulling out or cutting the vine under the sign could land you in two very different situations:

One where you had a usable item later on to solve a critical puzzle...

And one where you're basically fucked.

This was practically a running joke for the point and click genre. And RE Code Veronica where you may not win against the big bad because you forgot to get the magnum on the island earlier in the game before you switched characters.

My favorites were in Indiana Jones and Atlantis. That stuff epic later on. How much orichalcum to use? Hmmmm :p

+1 to all of the above.

I reckon that rendering a game impossible to finish by not doing something in the early stages is the worst sin a game can make.

As stated above, I think that it reeks of a mistake by the developers. Time does seem infinite when you're a kid and have no responsibilities, but at my age, I would never consider going back and starting a game because I sold a quest item early on. That game would (rightly) be deleted from my hard drive and never played again.

My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said: "More time." I rarely have enough time to sink into games, and Witcher 3 is the game that I have spent every available minute on since it released.

I would love to take a week off work all to myself and catch up on some games and movies I've missed.

While "dead man walking" mechanics sure are extremely frustrating, I wouldn't call those "bad design" per se.
Regarding the old Sierra games or old P'n'C games in general I would say it was a way for the developer to increase the time needed to complete the game by an considerable amount without the need to create more content. Content means more disk space and disk space was rare. Using a walkthrough or a guide lets you complete those games in two to three hours, if not less, so failing and restarting and learning what you did wrong made those games to "full games" regarding the play time.

And don't forget those games tried to "simulate" an adventure, they were no interactive movies or choose-your-own-path novels. And therefore you can die (sometimes by failure, sometimes by accident) and forget important items you would need in the end, just like in a real-life adventure.

Sure I'm glad those mechanics were abandoned as I am too old to sink twenty hours into a game of which ten are pure frustration.
But as we are nowadays flooded by "rouge-likes" which too make failing and restarting a vital part of the game I think the old P'n'Cs don't derserve any hate or blame. They are just the way adventure games used to be before greater technical possibilities and the shift of focus by LucasArts on telling creative stories instead of "simulating" adventures.