Softlock
Also called: Soft lock, Progression blocker
A softlock is a bug where the game keeps running but the player can no longer progress, for example stuck in a room with no way out.
A softlock leaves the game running, with menus and controls still responding, while progress becomes impossible. A hard lock freezes everything. Classic softlocks are a door that will not open because a trigger fired too early, a key item sold to a vendor, or a quest NPC who fell through the floor.
On Steam, softlocks are among the most damaging launch bugs, because they can surface late in a game after hours of play, and a save made in that state can trap the player for good. Reviews that mention a lost long save tend to stay near the top of the page.
QA looks for softlocks by breaking the intended order, doing quest steps out of sequence, saving and loading at every trigger, and selling or dropping key items. Each report states whether an older save escapes the lock, because that tells the studio if a patch alone can rescue affected players.
Updated · Written by JJ, founder of Jumbo Jelly.
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Related terms
- Repro steps
Repro steps are the numbered actions that make a bug happen again on demand, written so a developer can trigger it without asking the tester anything.
- Regression pass
A regression pass retests features that already worked after a code change, to catch bugs the new patch broke in old parts of the game.
- Day-one patch
A day-one patch is an update released on or right after launch day to fix bugs found after the release build was locked or once players arrived.
- Bug severity
Bug severity rates how badly a bug hurts the game, from a crash or lost save down to a cosmetic glitch, separately from how soon it gets fixed.