Lost Forever: Difference between revisions

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|[[Word of God|Daniel Erickson]] [http://darthhater.com/2011/09/24/egxp-interview-with-daniel-erickson/page/2 on] why ''[[Star Wars: The Old Republic]]'' is going to [[Averted Trope|Avert]] this.}}
 
Also frequently referred to as being "missable," the dreaded '''Lost Forever''' is a game play component (such as an item, weapon, [[Sidequest]], [[Secret Character|character]], or plot event) that can become permanently inaccessible after a certain point in the game, therefore being "lost forever" if you miss them during the period in which they are available. A close relative and often an example of [[Guide Dang It]]. The bane of gamers everywhere, especially those shooting for [[100% Completion]], as it often forces them to start the entire game anew if they're not willing to accept a less-than-perfect run.
 
Lost Forevers frequently appear in areas that can only be accessed once, or are rendered unavailable after a certain plot event occurs. [[Doomed Hometown|The early town that is destroyed]], the mountainous area that caves in once you leave it, the village that you're banished from, the [[Load-Bearing Boss]]'s [[Collapsing Lair|hideout that goes boom]] after you beat it, the one-shot place that you're never given the option to return to, and so forth.
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* ''[[Hotel Dusk: Room 215]]'' features a sidequest in which you can earn a prize from a vending machine. There is only one very short point in the game in which you can exchange your cash for change; after that, it's lost forever. (There is also no warning, making it a [[Guide Dang It]].)
** There is a kind-of new game plus mode after completing the game with an extra puzzle and ending, but the scavenger hunt item you get out of the machine changes, making the original Lost Forever unless you start a clean game. In addition, the original scavenger hunt vending item can be given to two different characters, but the only way to give it to one of them is to randomly guess the vending machine number, because there is no opportunity to give it to her after legitimately completing the scavenger hunt.
* The text-based game of ''[[LordThe ofHobbit the(1982 Ringsvideo game)|The Hobbit]]'' required Bilbo to get assistance frequently from either Gandalf or Thorin—most notably, getting out of the goblins' dungeon (you had to be carried out the window) and getting into Smaug's cave via the side entrance (the key broke if Thorin died). The game also depended on the elves' ''butler'' to periodically open the door to the wood elves' dungeon. If these parties were killed, various areas became unreachable, and randomly spawning enemies like goblins and the vicious warg often killed them while Bilbo was elsewhere.
* ''[[Return to Zork]]''. Most notoriously, if you cut instead of dig up the bonding plant at the very beginning of the game, killing it, you're [[Failure Is the Only Option|screwed]]. Even worse, it's very late in the game when you find this out. Additionally, there are many ways of killing it by accident if you do dig it up.
** Likewise, the earlier text game ''Spellbreaker'' had a plant that you needed to dig up rather than cut to solve a puzzle. And just to make sure as many people as possible found that out too late, the game placed a [[Red Herring]] pair of shears near the plant.
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*** Brought up again in two mutation modes, Last Gnome on Earth and Healing Gnome. Both modes require you to carry the gnome from start to finish (on any map, not just Dark Carnival this time) and you can't advance to the next level without the gnome in your hands. If the gnome gets tossed over a fence or left behind a [[Point of No Return]], the game is then [[Unwinnable]]
** This might be a shout out to ''[[System Shock 2]]''. In the training mission (before you pick your class etc.) you can find a basketball. If you pick it up, it will stay with in your inventory to the actual game (in between of which there is a three year training period, mind you :)). If you keep it with you all the way up to the recreational sector of the ship (very far into the game), you can throw it into a hoop. You then recieve a secret prize.
* There are five audio diaries in ''[[BioShock (series)|BioShock ]]'' in two areas that you cannot backtrack to.
** ''Bioshock 2'' has you collecting research information on enemies in exchange for unique character abilities. The early [[Mook]] enemies [[Sorting Algorithm of Evil|stop spawning once you're strong enough]], so if you haven't maxed out their Research Track, say goodbye to their bonus and the [[One Hundred Percent Completion]] achievement for Research.
** Given the finite amount of ADAM one can receive in any given playthrough, certain Plasmids, Gene Tonics and Upgrades can be Lost Forever if you did not purchase them before your ADAM ran out. Likewise, there are only a limited number of Power to the People Vending Machines in the game, which is less than how many times you can upgrade each weapon in total (each Power to the People will be permanently deactivated when you use them). On top of that, if you Kill Sander Cohen, one of these limited machines will also be Lost Forever, further limiting your upgrades.
** Considering you can't backtrack between levels at all in ''[[BioShock (series)]] 2'', any audio diaries you haven't collected when you advance to the next level become this.
* In ''[[Quake]]'', it's a given that you can't backtrack to previous levels. However, maps E4M4 and E4M5 have a message saying you forgot something important if you didn't pickup a certain weapon on that level. This would imply that it would be lost forever, but the following levels contains the weapons you skipped past. To trigger those message, you're likely going out of your way to skip them.
* ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'' gave users the ability to permanently delete unlocked weapons. For a brief period, players were panicking over the prospects of not being able to re-unlock these weapons, because they were tied to achievements whose records were stored on Valve's servers—in other words, those achievements could not be manually cleared. Then Valve introduced their new [[Randomly Drops]] system of attaining unlockables, and not only could players breathe easily, but suddenly being able to delete duplicate items became VERY important.
** A give-away for unique medals for the Soldier class was held on a first-come first-serve basis. If you missed the giveaway there is no other way to get a medal for your Soldier.
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* ''[[Doom]] II'' has a level (''[[MAP 27]]: Monster Condo'') with an area which sneakily seals itself off 30 seconds after the level starts, and is thereafter totally inaccessible (it can be opened only from the inside). It's not too far away from the start point, but unless you know about this sector beforehand there's absolutely no way you'd find it in a normal play through the level. What's worse is that it's a marked Secret Area, so it affects the score on the intermission screen; if you get to the area too slow, you're not getting 100% secrets.
* In ''[[Descent]] II'', some secrets are only accessible by one-shot timed doors or become blocked off by [[Mobile Maze]] barriers. If the door closes, fugeddaboudit.
* In ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)|Call of Cthulhu]]: [[Dark Corners of the Earth]]'', the refinery contains a sniper rifle, but it's hidden behind a door in an office you pass through. If you do not close the door behind yourself and take the rifle when you first enter the room, it will be Lost Forever, as you cannot return to the office once you leave it. What's worse, getting this rifle is necessary for a [[100% Completion]]... which is the only way to see the proper ending and make sense of the plot.
* In ''[[Red Faction]]: Guerrilla'', the most useful vehicles are the Walker mechs. Because they're so perfect for destroying things, you will almost never see them outside of the specific missions where you use one. There are a few places where you can find a Walker, unless you destroyed the building that was there. In the unlikely event that you either just happened not to destroy the building where one of the Walkers might spawn, or you knew beforehand not to destroy that building, you could very well see a Walker there. Most of these buildings are EDF property which you are encouraged to demolish, and if the building is gone, you can't get a Walker from there anymore.
* ''[[Killing Floor]]'' has added a few promotional playermodels, only obtainable by preordering another game (such as the protagonist of ''The Ball'') or unlocking a specific number of achievements during an event (10 of 13 summer achievements to unlock a [[Steampunk]] version of [[Ensemble Darkhorse|Mr. Foster]]); when the game is released or the event ends, you can no longer get the models.
* In ''[[Strangers Wrath|Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath]]'', we have the Binoculars, which are ''only'' available at the General Store in Gizzard's Gulch (right at the ''start of the game''), and said General Store gets destroyed in the battle with Boilz Booty. Didn't buy the Binoculars? Well then, you won't be able to use the game's [[Sniper Rifle]] equivalent, the [[One-Hit Kill|Sniper Wasps]], as they can only be accessed/used through the Binoculars. [[Guide Dang It|This is mentioned nowhere.]]
 
 
=== General ===
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=== [[Roguelike]] ===
* In [[RoguelikesRoguelike]]s (''[[Angband]]'', for example), items are usually unidentified when you first find them, and they can always be generated again later. This includes unique "artifact" items, but only if you ''don't identify them'', since artifacts are only generated once ''per game''. If you ID an item and it turns out to be an artifact, it is Lost Forever when you leave the level and you're not carrying it.
** ''[[TOME]]'' has a few dungeons with special named levels, which are different in that they aren't randomly generated, and thus the same in every game. They also have the same unique monsters and artifacts in every game. They ''also'' disappear if you leave (for example via the down staircase) and if you attempt to go back to it, you'll just get a randomly generated level instead. So, you only get one shot at grabbing those artifacts (whether found on the floor or dropped from a unique) before leaving the level, or they're Lost Forever. Make sure to have some free inventory space when you get there.
* In ''[[Ancient Domains of Mystery|ADOM]]'', the Pyramid (which holds two awesome artifacts) is a prime example of this trope. It closes as soon as you reach level 17. Besides, it is a rather difficult place, which means that you want all the skill you can. So...
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* In ''[[The Godfather (video game)|The Godfather]]: The Game'' there are [[Thief Bag]]s with cash in every mission that will disappear after the mission is over. Fortunately, it's just cash, which you can easily earn elsewhere.
 
== [[Web Original]] ==
* Any website that doesn't allow the Internet Archive to search its old pages.
* At [[TV Tropes]] (and by extension here), due to The Great Crash, certain examples and [[TV Tropes Made of Win Archive]] articles were Lost... ''Forever''...
* All The Tropes has its own examples, thanks to the Orain hack and an earlier crash. For instance, the current version of the page for [[Lord Buckley]] is a reconstruction of one posted just before the hack.
* From ''[[That Guy With The Glasses]]'':
** A video by [[That Dude in the Suede]] that ranted against YoutubeYouTube's takedowns of ''[[The Nostalgia Critic]]'' episodes which caught the interest of [[Doug Walker]] and in turn was responsible for That Guy With The Glasses/Channel Awesome becoming a showcase for more contributors other than Walker is lost and gone forever. The reason? Suede said he'd delete the video when the dispute between Walker and [[YouTube]] had run its course and Suede had saved the video on a now long-gone college computer.
** Every single video that [[Unperson|Daniel "That Aussie Guy" Rizzo]] made for the site.
** [[The Nostalgia Chick]]'s controversial review of the ''[[Dune]]'' movie.
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* Fanfiction.net never lets any [[Fan Fiction]] remain on the site forever. Which is sad, since the Wayback Machine can't archive anything there...
* Public user photo site Fotopic went into administration in 2011, taking with it 8 years worth of images, websites, galleries... the lot. And with the Wayback Machine unable to save anything from it, it's all gone for good.
* ThereAt isone time there was a [https://web.archive.org/web/20140109180705/http://lostforeverwiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page wiki] for this trope, but it'sas inyou it'smight earlyguess days andfrom needs somethe [[WikiWayback MagicMachine]] link it itself is long gone, and it appears that in its short life it didn't manage to save much.
* The staff of [[Tumblrtumblr]] tried to ''enforce'' this trope by banning volunteer teams who were frantically trying to rescue/archive content from "adult" pages that were going to be destroyed when it [[Think of the Advertisers!|purged itself of adult content to better appeal to advertisers]] in December 2018.
 
== [[Real Life]] ==
* The Honjo Masamune, probably the most famous sword made by the swordsmith Gorō Nyūdō Masamune, was by and large considered the single finest katana ever made and was a personal treasure of the Tokugawa Shogunate, as well as a Japanese National Treasure. In 1945, Prince Tokugawa Iemasa entrusted the Honjo Masamune and 14 other swords to a Police station in Mejiro, only for them to be given to a sergeant of the 7th Air Cavalry of the United States Military one month later. Since then, however, the whereabouts of the sword are completely unknown.
** 'The Greatest Generation' really got their hands on a lot of cool loot.
* ThereAs of late 2023, there are 106[https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-missing-episodes-1960s/ 97] [[Missing Episode|missing episodes]] of ''[[Doctor Who]]'', the master copies of which were destroyed to make room in the BBC archives. But don't give up hope -- [https://thedoctorwhocompanion.com/2023/08/04/missing-episodes-of-doctor-who-are-definitely-out-there-and-will-eventually-be-recovered/ every once in a while one of these is rediscovered]. When this entry was originally written in the 2010s, there were ''106'' missing episodes.
** AndThere are countless other lost TV series and episodes, as seen on [[Keep Circulating the Tapes]].
* [[wikipedia:Lost film|Many films]], especially from the silent cinema and early 'talkie' era, were not well archived, and as such they either vanished into the dustbin of history or had missing scenes.
** And the earliest methods of copying the films for distribution actually ''degrades'' the strips that's being copied from.
** Not to mention that early filmstock is dangerously flammable, and entire archives have subsequently been lost to fire.
* In one of the ballsiest moves in the history of modern music (from a band that made their ''entire career'' on being ballsy), anti-establishment electronica duo [[The KLF]] celebrated their departure from the music industry by deleting their entire back catalogue. If you want to hear their music now, good luck finding old copies of their records on eBay.
** To clarify, the term "deleted" means no longer in print by request of the artist. This happens a lot, but the artist usually only "deletes" an album/single or two, not their entire discography. It's pretty easy to find their discography on the internet, minus a few releases that may or may not exist. Whether or not the master tapes still exist is up for debate.
* Averted by [[Tom Lehrer]], who put his entire catalogue into the public domain at the end of 2022, after which he had all his tracks packaged up and posted on the net for anyone who wanted them.
* Any time a species goes extinct.
* In early July 2019, every single eBook ever sold by Microsoft, including those that were free to download -- along with any personal annotations anyone ever made to their copies -- abruptly ceased to be available when Microsoft got out of the eBook business and decided that maintaining a skeleton DRM system so that its customers could keep their books was ''more trouble and more expensive'' than issuing refunds for every book they ever sold, along with a US$25 credit for the loss of annotations.
** Microsoft did something similar to ''[[w:AltspaceVR|AltspaceVR]]'' in 2023. As one of the earlier virtual environments on several VR devices, it had a good following that grew to thousands of users and "worlds", but it was free to use and unprofitable for its owners except as a source of ideas. Microsoft bought it in 2017, when the original developer ran out of money to run it. They used some of its features in their other products, [[Executive Meddling|messed about]] for a few years and then pulled the plug.
* ''[[Relatively Absent]]'' by Mark "Togashi Gaijin" Shurtleff, was an incomplete, [[Doorstopper|epic-length]] ''[[Ranma ½]]/[[Sailor Moon]]'' [[Crossover Fic]] of remarkable quality that at 11 large chapters was clearly still in the process of setting up its plot when Shurtleff abandoned fan fiction entirely in 2009. He took down his story archives and managed to purge ''Relatively Absent'' (and his other fan writing) entirely from the Web -- even from the [[Wayback Machine]]. He then spent the next ten years or so firing off take-down notices to every site that tried to repost it. Archives of this and his other stories exist and [[Keep Circulating the Tapes|are traded fan-to-fan]], but unless you know someone who has it, you're out of luck.
 
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