The bad ending. It’s a unique trope in the gaming space, as games these days often give you different endings depending on what you do throughout the game.
Getting the bad ending is usually reserved for those who don’t pay attention throughout the game, or rush to the end, but some games can spring that bad ending on you without you even knowing what you did wrong. It’s a jarring experience when it happens and can leave you second-guessing your entire playthrough.
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We’re going to check out a bunch of games where getting the bad ending is something that’s awfully common.
This is an article about endings, so spoilers about how these games end are inevitable
10The Witcher 3
You Don’t Know What’s Best
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Fextralife Wiki
The Witcher 3is an incredible game, and it has 3 distinct endings you can get depending on your choices throughout the game. There is one clearly bad ending for you to get: Geralt hunts down the Crone Weavess and kills her, taking Ciri’s Medallion from her and being consumed shortly after by a swarm of monsters.
The way you get this ending is by reacting negatively to choices involving Ciri throughout the game. Doing this makes it so she has no confidence when faced with The White Frost, and she dies defeating it. How or why that happens is unknown, but that’s what goes down.
The tricky part is realizing what choices will affect this ending. For example, does it make immediate sense to you to let Ciri destroy a lab? Or choose to have a snowball fight with her while the fate of the world hangs in the balance? Maybe that’s clear to you, but for many, they went with rational decisions over ones that favored Ciri and ended up with a very sad and dark ending.
9Cyberpunk 2077
There is No Good Ending
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077isn’t about the good or bad, but rather the gray. That applies to the endings of which there are many, but the bad ending in particular, where you’re stuck in a space station being experimented on, is the first ending I got, and I didn’t do anything that seemed obvious to guide me there.
I took Hanako’s deal, thinking that Arasaka is the most qualified to help with the chip. That was absolutely not the move, as it ended with me trapped in a ship in space undergoing bizarre tests and given an option to either sell my soul or return to Earth to live out my days. That’s not a great deal, to say the least, and it didn’t happen because I missed a side quest or chose the wrong dialogue at some point.
It happened because I made a choice. I wanted V to live,but I put my trust in the wrong person. I should’ve gone with Panam, I should’ve let Johnny take over and storm Arasaka. It was too easy for me to end up with the bad ending because it wasn’t telegraphed. In that way, it’s a brilliant spin on the usual formula. I didn’t know who the devil was when I shook her hand.
8Mass Effect 3
If You Only Follow the Main Story, You’re Screwed
Mass Effect 3
People love to meme theMass Effect 3ending for taking nothing into account of what you’ve done, but that’s simply not true. You can get the bad ending in this game very easily, and that’s by just focusing on the story itself without doing any of the side quests.
Side quests are generally optional, but in Mass Effect 3, they are absolutely crucial to achieving the best outcome for Shepard and his crew. If you just want a streamlined experience, you’ll not be ready to face the Reaper threat for the final battle.
Without that support, your ending choices go from three to one. Destroy. The ending is debatable on whether it’s the bad ending, but the game presents it as such, and it’s incredibly easy to get it by accident.
If you’re someone who prefers to mainline the story and nothing else, you’re going to get the bad ending, and it’s not even because you did anything particularly wrong. You just didn’t feel like spending 70+ hours to 100% a game. You got the bad ending because you respected your own time. Shame on you.
7Lies of P
Don’t You Want To Be a Real Boy?
Lies of Pisan amazing gamewith a lot of nuance to its story, and that comes with the multiple different endings you can get. The bad ending is pretty clear-cut, but what is not clear is how incredibly easy it is to get that if you’re not careful.
If you enter the final fight with a humanity level lower than 5, you will have no choice but to give up your heart to Gepetto and get the bad ending. This means your humanity is gone, and you submit to giving up your soul so Gepetto can have his son back in your body.
Lies of P Developers Get Awesome Bonuses Due To Game’s Sales Success
Time to rest is just one of the bonuses.
This can happen from just playing the game normally. The only way you gain humanity is by doing side quests, listening to records, and managing to select the right dialogue choices at the right time.
It’s so easy to miss these things, and if you do, you don’t even get to fight the Nameless Puppet; you’ve failed, and you probably didn’t even know why.
6Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Your Father or Your Lord?
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Sekirohas several endings, and how you get them all is so obscure I won’t even begin to go into it here. However, the bad ending is actually very easy to get and may actually confuse you that you were able to unlock it in the first place.
The moment of truth comes when your father asks you whether you will honor or break your code. Now, this might be clear to some of you, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t like Kuro very much. He was creepy, immortal, and I thought Owl Father was a far more compelling character.
I stuck by Owl Father here, and what was I greeted with?Two wildly tough fightsand an ending where I became Shura, a sort of eternal war-seeking entity that isn’t particularly clear.
It was so easy to get this by accident because I didn’t think there was a chance the game would be over so soon. I thought it might add to a much different story path, but nope, two fights, and you’re done.
It’s not something you may redo either. You have to restart the game at that point, and it’s a painful and jarring ending that is all too easy to unlock by accident.
5Undertale
Killing is Bad
Undertaleis a wild RPG that is so much more than meets the eye, and it has a bunch of endings that can be triggered based on how you play the game. Thebad ending is the annihilation ending, and that one is unlocked by killing every enemy in every area and every boss as well.
The reason this is so tough to avoid is that you have to fight every instinct you’ve had when playing an RPG. Don’t you usually kill all the enemies in every area? Don’t you usually defeat every boss? It’s part of the trick that Undertale plays on you to get you to rewire yourself to play by their rules.
If you play by your rules, though, like you have in many games before. The world will turn on you, and you’ll be outed as the monster you’ve always been. It’s so tough to avoid this because the allure is too great. you may’t really tell who is friend or foe here, so why not just fight them all?
4Spec Ops: The Line
Lost Behind the Lines
Spec Ops: The Line
Spec Ops: The Lineis a harrowing experience, and it’s fair to say that there is no real good ending, but there is most certainly a bad ending. The worst of those endings is where Walker basically becomes Konrad, the renegade general that he came to apprehend, but who has been dead this whole time.
Finding out thatKonrad has been dead since you arrivedis shocking, but it’s what to do next that is so tricky. Do you shoot yourself? Shoot the reflection of Konrad? Fight the soldiers and die? Surrender? It’s such a tough moment to get a grip on, and the bad ending comes from doing the thing you’ve been trying to do all game: survive.
By fighting the soldiers and surviving, you essentially take Konrad’s place as a commander with a mind lost to war and all humanity left in its wake. It’s so tough to avoid this one because it means coming to grips with who you are as a player, which is what the game wants from you. Some aren’t brave enough to accept that reflection and fight on towards an uncertain end, no matter what.
3NieR Automata
Where Does Your Loyalty Lie?
NieR: Automata
Nier Automatais a mind-bending game with so many endings it’s hard to keep track of, but the complete endings require 3 full playthroughs to actually unlock.
The bad ending is ending D, and you get this by simply sticking with a character that you’ve experienced two full playthroughs with at that point. If you choose 9S in the final battle, you’re going to get the worst ending, and even though he’s gone full genocidal maniac at that point, part of me thought he could be saved if we just chose to fight as him.
That is not the case at all, as he kills A2 and then gets impaled in the process, leaving them both to die as the entire structure crumbles and collapses on top of both of them. No choices along the way lead you to this point, just a final coin flip at the end of who you want to survive.
I was far more attached to 9S at that point in the game, so it was an easy choice for me, and it left me with a brutal and depressing ending in a game that specializes in those categories.
2Dragon Age: Origins
Quality Time in the Medieval Apocalypse
Dragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age: Originshas a ton of variations to its endings, but the worst one is where all of your party members die or abandon you. You might think it’s hard to achieve such a goal, but really, it can happen very easily if you’re not paying attention.
There is a relationship meter for each party member, and if you don’t particularly care for someone, they may either try to kill you or abandon you completely. This can happen out of nowhere, as there is nothing suggesting that you need to spend more time with them or any hand-holding.
You can also lose party members because you go against their morals, and some will just outright attack you, depending on the decision you make in a crucial moment. You can find yourself an enemy of everyone in Dragon Age: Origins with just a few seemingly simple dialogue choices. The end result is that you are more or less alone for the final battle.
It’s difficult to avoid this path if you don’t understand the relationship system and refuse to give gifts to your companions or do any of their personal quests. Your eyes may be locked on the Darkspawn and nothing else, and if that’s the case, you may find yourself in a very lonely and dark world.
You Took Too much ADAM
Bioshockdoesn’t seem like it would be a game to even have multiple endings, as you don’t have all that much choice throughout the game, but that is very much the case.
Which ending you get is determined by one thing. How many Little Sisters did you save? This is tough because harvesting them makes the game far easier. You become more powerful and more able to take on the threats that await you. The temptation is too great, and these aren’t exactly innocent people you’re saving.
Even if you only dabble in your harvesting of the Little Sisters, you’re going to get a bad ending, but if you harvest them all, you’ll get the worst ending. There is nothing suggesting this will be the case until you defeat the final boss and then see the horror. You’re taking over Rapture with an army of Splicers ready to conquer the world. All because you wanted the game to be a little easier.
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The final boss in a game is usually the end point, right? Well, what if it didn’t have to be? Let’s check out.
