Permanently Missable Content / First-Person Shooter

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• There are five audio diaries in BioShock in two areas that you cannot backtrack to: the Welcome Center and Rapture Central Control.
  • BioShock 2 has you collecting research information on enemies in exchange for unique character abilities. The early Mook enemies stop spawning once you're strong enough, so if you haven't maxed out their Research Track, say goodbye to their bonus and the 100% 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 permanently missable 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, as each one will be permanently deactivated once you use them, but there are enough to fully upgrade your arsenal — the problem is that plenty of them are rather well-hidden. On top of that, if you kill Sander Cohen in Fort Frolic rather than his home in Olympus Heights, one of these limited machines in his bedroom will also be permanently missable.
  • Considering you can't backtrack between levels at all in BioShock 2, any audio diaries you haven't collected when you advance to the next level become this.
• Borderlands series:
  • All the unique weapons across the series can be obtained once per playthrough.
  • Borderlands has the Rider, a fairly standard scopeless sniper rifle. The gun itself is a reference to A Christmas Story, both in its similarity in appearance to the BB gun Ralphie wanted for Christmas, and to the spoiler text — "Careful... you might put someone's eye out" — which is a quote from the movie. It can be found in a hidden basement in New Haven, the entrance to which is only unlocked while a single mission — Another Piece of the Puzzle — is active. Once the Vault Key piece is picked up, the door to the hidden basement locks again, and the Rider is lost until you get back to New Haven in Playthrough 2.
  • Borderlands 2:
    • There's a bug which resets one's Badass Rank. Badass Rank changes the character's stats and is saved to one's profile. Completing challenges is the only way to gain ranks, and as the bug doesn't reset one's challenges, any completed challenges were done for naught. In response to this, the PC version of Borderlands 2 has added the ability to reset challenges once 85% of the non-DLC ones are completed.
    • Prior to the introduction of Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode, most people would be almost miserly in preserving sidequests in True Vault Hunter Mode. This is because once you finish the main quest, all side quests changes their level and their reward's level to 50, which was the highest player level at the time. Unfortunately, a few pieces of extremely useful rewards (Rubi is a notable one) cannot be obtained any other way other than through the quest, so players would go to absurd lengths to put off even accepting the quests until Handsome Jack is deader than dead. Ultimate Vault Hunter mode fixed this, as the quests in that mode is always scaled to the player's current level and you can always reset your progress, giving you multiple shots at the same quest.
    • During the Loot Hunt event, several enemies were temporarily given a rare gun as a special loot drop. These guns are normally available through other methods in-game, but one gun stood out; the Grog Nozzle. Normally you're only given the Nozzle as a quest item to get some Dwarves Drunk (it's a long story) and it is removed upon completing the quest. This Grog Nozzle, however, permanently remains in your stash. Unfortunately, as the event has ended, there is currently no legitimate way to obtain a non-quest related Grog Nozzle in the base game.
    • Prior to The Raid on Digistruct Peak, the challenge that tasks you to complete optional mission objectives used to be an example of this. You only get one shot in each playthrough to finish the optional objectives, and that's it. Not even joining a friend's game to do the mission again will count towards the challenge if you've completed the mission already. If you're looking to finish the challenge, better take care. In said DLC, the Digistruct Peak gauntlet can be run an unlimited number of times and features an optional objective that's basically given to you for free.
    • The Stinkpot, a unique Jakobs assault rifle, is very easily missable, as it's a rare drop from a single non-respawning enemy. If you want one, better get to Save Scumming.
    • Players have only one shot at completing the challenge "Save the Turrets" in the Eridium Blight map and it's right at the time when the Vault Hunters have to protect Claptrap, who's hacking the entrance to "Hero's Pass". Didn't you earn the Badass Points from this challenge? Too bad.
    • Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty's final level has an area that can only be accessed during the missions "X Marks The Spot" and "Treasure of the Sands", which are the missions where both Roscoe and the Leviathan are fought. After the Leviathan is defeated, a gate in the map opens, revealing a room filled to the brim with weapon chests. Outside of these missions, not only the Leviathan won't respawn, thus preventing the player to use the Leviathan's arm as a bridge, but the gate will remain closed even if the player exited and re-loaded the game without turning in either mission. Furthermore, there are two area-specific challenges which can only be completed during the aforementioned missions: "Bleeding Scarlett" requires the player to defeat Roscoe in less than a minute, and "Lost Lost Treasure" requires the player to find the super secret chamber in the Chamber of the Lost Treasure.
    • Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt also features an area in its final level which can only be accessed once per playthrough after defeating both Jackenstein and Nakayama: an armory with 28 weapon chests. Trying to access it with glitches will result in players facing a death wall that puts them in Fight For Your Life state.
    • Three instances related to Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary: the levels "Fight for Sanctuary" and "Paradise Sanctum" can be played only once per playthrough. Both levels become inaccessible after the events that take place on them as Sanctuary itself is first taken over, and then destroyed. As for the remaining instance, there's an area in the "Helios Fallen" level called "Cage of Angels", which only becomes accessible during the "Sirentology" optional mission, and becomes inaccessible after the mission is completed.
• In 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 permanently missable, 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 the online play of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, any equipment added to the Retired category and later removed from online play. If you happened to have any Retired equipment in your inventory, but discard them after they're removed from online play, then you will not be able to get them back. Players that are new to online play after the Retired equipment are removed from play will not be able to earn them.
• 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, fuhgeddaboudit.
  • The Mega Missile in the first Descent game and the Earthshaker Missile in the second have a finite number of missiles you can pick up in the entire game. Didn't figure out the puzzle and get those Shakers before escaping that mission? They're gone. Died or failed to escape after blowing up the reactor? You start the next level with the base loadout you started the game with. Those four Shakers you were saving? Gone.
  • The first and second games have hostages that can be rescued, and rescuing them all nets you a post-mission bonus. The catch is that if you die after picking them up, they'll die, too, screwing you out of the mission bonus.
• Doom:
  • Doom II has a level (MAP27: 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.
  • Some third-party map packs make it worse by making secret exits permanently missable.
    • E2M5 of Doom the Way id Did requires you to find three secret areas before allowing you to visit the fourth which contains the secret exit... except one is made inexplicably inaccessible after a certain point in the level. Naturally, you get no indication that you need to visit all three secrets and no indication that one of them gets permanently sealed off.
    • Scythe 2 also has a secret exit in MAP31 that closes off 11 seconds after the map starts, similar to the Monster Condo example above. Also, you need to get all three keys and make it to the exit within the allotted time frame. It's so bad that in the ZDoom wiki's page regarding the engine's map translator feature, the example there specifically makes that exit easier to reach by slowing down the sector that eventually seals the exit.
• In Far Cry 5 there are two NPCs, Eli and Virgil, who both give you missions and get killed at a certain point in the game later on(in both cases it's when you raise the Resistance points in their respective regions to level 3), so if you put off doing their missions for too long, you're shit out of luck.
• In Far Cry 6 the Big Game Bait gadget can become permanetly unobtainable if you upgrade the Hunter's Lodge so the animals always drop their skins if you kill them with any weapon, thus not dropping Damaged meat anymore required to craft it. The "Canadian, Eh?" Wrist Gear can also be permanetly lost if you decide to spare Sean McKay.
• In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, in the beginning of the game, Gordon and Alyx are stopped in a communications shack talking to the headquarters of the resistance. Underneath a shelf next to the locked exit door is a gnome. If you pick up the gnome and take it with you, all through the game, at the end, if you place it into the rocket, you get an achievement unlock. The Gnome never appears any other place in the entire game, and if you don't get it in that shack, you can never get it again.
• The gnome later appeared in the Dark Carnival campaign for Left 4 Dead 2. You also got an achievement when you brought it to the end. Noticing a pattern here... It also leads to some funny moments, as you have to win a shooting gallery while being attacked by hordes of zombies to get it, and whoever's carrying it is mostly defenseless. It leads to some funny voice-chat comms, too. "Protect the holy gnomecarrier"! This is 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
• 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 receive a secret prize.
• 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 Mr. Foster); when the game is released or the event ends, you can no longer get the models. Tripwire's apparently learned something from this, as the events return each year with the chance to unlock the previous year's achievements and their rewards, alongside the new achievements and rewards, while playermodels unlocked from other games now require buying the deluxe edition (Red Orchestra 2) or just owning the game in the first place (Team Fortress 2, before it went free to play, and RO2's Rising Storm expansion) rather than requiring a preorder - the aforementioned protagonist from The Ball remains the only promotional playermodel that is no longer available, and even then, as of the 2013 Twisted Christmas event, a second version of the model is now available for everyone who owns The Ball.
• Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath has 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 Sniper Wasps, as they can only be accessed/used through the Binoculars. This is mentioned nowhere.
• 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 permanently missable, 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.
• Quake II and its mission packs have the Unit exits, which prevent players from backtracking to a previous area and pick up everything they couldn't get and may need in later levels. In addition:
  • The Secret Level "Sudden Death" (where players may find the Railgun first, and another Quad Damage) can ge entered only once, and there's a time limit of 30 seconds where the player must pick up as much as they can. Afterwards the player is returned to the Receiving Center and the level cannot be accessed anymore.
  • The initial fan control room in "Inner Hangar" can be revisited until the computer which controls the fan is turned off. This is, of course, necessary to proceed to the lower floor of the area.
  • The Expansion Pack The Reckoning has three examples:
    • "Outer Compound": At one point, crossing the red warning bars will lock the room and display a hidden section with some Gunners and Enforcers attacking you. This secret section also hold some health packages which you may lose once you disable the siren.
    • "Inner Compound": There's a secret area holding a Quad Damage in the laser device room which can only be reached before destroying the wall with the laser, as it also destroys the crates used to reach the area.
    • "The Warehouse": Like the core game's "Inner Hangar", there's a room (this time, a secret) which can only be reached before destroying the power source used to get the fan spinning. The area contains several items, among them an Adrenaline. Of course, destroying said power source is vital in order to obtain the Security Pass.
  • The Expansion Pack Ground Zero also have these:
    • The "Tectonic Stabilizer" level can be revisited until all of its objectives are completed; afterwards, not only you're given a 30-seconds timer in order to escape the level; and after escaping (staying and using the God cheat code is NOT an option) the player can't go back.
    • The entrance to the Secret Level "Mine Engineering" (where the player can first find the Chainfist) is only enabled after completing all of the objectives in "Tectonic Stabilizer" and going through for a certain broken pipe; which can be easily missable. It's a "race against the rising lava" level, and players can't go back to it once they exit to the "Thaelite Mines" level.
    • A minor example in the "Waterfront Storage" level, in the warehouse area there's a tram with a box on it which you need to ride in order to obtain a secret Megahealth which you may miss otherwise.
    • There's a section in the "Waste Processing" level where you must turn on a reactor, and once it's activated you have a frame time of 15 seconds to escape from the area before dying slowly from radiation, and not even the God cheat code can save you from death. This area also holds a secret Megahealth, so you better pick it up and every item the area holds before the time expires.
    • The "Maintenance Hangar" level has one secret right after the player comes from completing all of the objectives in the "Waste Disposal" level, whose execution can be annoying and require swiss-clock precision: the player must try not to get fried by the incinerator's conveyor belt, go to the upper floor, drop above one of the caps,and look for a shootable button. A secret Invulnerability will fall into one of these containers. Which one to look for is a case of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, but "Quick Save" and "Quick Load" are your friends here. And not only there's the chance of missing this item, but the player may also get locked into one of these containers and killed.
• Red Faction:
  • In the original game, the Fusion Rocket Launcher is never found lying around in any level and can only be acquired from some heavy mercenaries (who switch to a precision rifle if you get too close to them). You can go through the whole game without picking it up.
  • The Anti-Personnel Weapon in Red Faction II can only be acquired after your first battle with Repta. If you miss it, you won't be able to get it afterward.
  • 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.
• Each set of Side Missions for Shadow Warrior 2 becomes inaccessible if you advance too far in the main storyline before attending to them. The game gives you a warning when you are about to take on a quest that will make certain side missions inaccessible, such as the quest that ends with Smith being killed.
• Strife, for most part, allows you to revisit any of previous maps at any time outside of a Point of No Return near the end. However, killing a certain boss ^note or more specifically, obtaining a special weapon right after his defeat results in two of the maps being permanently replaced with new versions, with the old versions of these replaced maps no longer being available. Due to this, three maps that were accessible from the latter replaced map end up being sealed off forever, including a Bonus Dungeon. This results in a permanent stamina and accuracy upgrade being lost as well as several secret areas required for an achievement in the Veteran Edition.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The game 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 Random Drop system of attaining unlockables, and not only could players breathe easily, but suddenly being able to delete duplicate items became VERY important.
  • There are many limited items that no longer drop for players in-game (such as promotional items given away in Team Fortress 2 if you pre-ordered a certain game on Steam), although some of these can still be traded between players. One of the most prominent of these items are 11,111 unique medals for the Soldier class distributed through a hidden page on the Team Fortress 2 website where they were given away on a "first come, first serve" basis in 2009. Each medal was individually assigned a number up to 11,111 based on what order it was given out. If you missed the giveaway there is no other way to get a medal for your Soldier outside of striking a deal with another player that was lucky enough to grab one. Good luck with trying to trade for one as they are valuable enough to go for real-life money, with medals with special numbers (like low numbers or those with meaning numbers like #1337 or #777) worth even more.
  • Valve rewarded all players who didn't use external idling programs to gain unlockables with a halo called Cheater's Lament. It initially thought to be one of these for those who missed out on it until it was again redistributed a year later during the Mann-Conomy update of 2010. Erroneously, many who used an external idling program and therefore were excluded from the original distribution went on to receive one anyways in 2010. However, the halo has not seen another redistribution since.
  • Subverted with the Mildly Disturbing Halloween Mask and the Ghastly Gibus. The former was only attainable during the first Halloween event by picking up 20 treat drops from dead players, but since it is an annual event, players get the chance to get it again every Halloween. The Ghastly Gibus on the other hand was attainable the same way as the Gentle Manne's Service Medal, through a secret page. However, it can be attained by gaining an achievement which involved dominating a player that has said hat equipped at the domination. Unlike the Mildly Disturbing Halloween Mask, it can also be attained even when the Halloween event is not active.
  • The Gibus has become a weird moving-target example of this. Although it was once given out through a hidden page like the Gentle Mann's Service Medal, it can be obtained in its basic form at any time by dominating a player who's wearing it. But each Halloween event, the existing Gibuses get "upgraded" in name and appearance. First, there were 3 levels of Gibus: Ghastly (1), Ghastlier (2), and the highly confusing "Ghastlierest" (3). Newborn Gibuses start at the first level and will reach the third level two Halloweens later. However, as of the Spectral Halloween Special 2012 event, all new Gibuses are obtained as the Ghostly Gibus, which does not level up. Thus, all those previous versions are permanently missable, and eventually all of the Ghastly and Ghastlier Gibuses will be gone because they leveled up.
  • Valve also likes to give away items based on when you buy OTHER games. For example, the only way to get Bill's Hat was to pre-order Left 4 Dead 2 and the only way to get the Big Kill, the Lugermorph, and Max's Severed Head was to pre-order Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse or buy it the first week it came out. Poker Night at the Inventory gives you a second chance to get The Lugermorph.
  • Introduced in the lead-up to the Engineer Update was the Golden Wrench. Basically, in order to get it, you had to wait for a specific time for the opportunity to open, and then you have a one out of a hundred chance to get it... by crafting. There are only 100 Golden Wrenches in total. However, for every 25 Golden Wrenches crafted, part of the Engineer update was revealed.
  • The concept of Vintage and Genuine items were meant to be a sort of mid-ground. Vintages was made to retroactively make an item rare by denoting that it was made before a certain time. Genuine Items, on the other hand, replaced Promo-only items so that non-genuine versions of the items can be found by players through the game proper, as former promo-only items tend to become valuable commodities in trading, resulting in people hoarding them and not using them as intended.

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