133 replies to this topic

[Qwinn]

Okay, somewhere along the line, unless DA is unprecedented in that they actually fix a good number of their dialogue bugs in official patches, and since players have the necessary tools available, there will be a player made fixpack at some point. Might be by me if I can ever find the time and no one beats me to it (won't be anytime real soon, as I have to update my PS:T mods first and not even finding much time for that), but I think it'd be pretty useful to whoever does it if we start documenting the bugs we know about now. I'll start off with what I've found, please feel free to add what you see.

1) Exploit for infinite approval from Sten. It's documented in Wikia thus:

"Once Sten has joined the party speak to him until the option "Why did you come to Ferelden?" appears in the list of questions. Continue the conversation with any of the listed options until the option "Why would the qunari care about the Blight?" appears. Select it then select "I'm a Grey Warden. It's my job." Then select "Did you find the answer to his question." Now the option "Why would the qunari..." will appear again creating a loop. Each loop is worth 4 approval. "

There was a note on the wikia claiming that this bug was fixed as of patch 1.01a, but testing confirms it's still there, at least in the PC version, as of 1.02a.

2) Get Sten's quest to find his sword. Go to the tower lake and talk to the guy who directs you to Faryn near Orzammar (sp?). If you go to that guy, he'll tell you that Dwyn in Redcliffe has the sword. However, if you go -directly- to Dwyn without visiting Faryn, you know all about him having the sword, which you shouldn't be able to know. You logically shouldn't be able to skip that step.

3) The ancient elven boots are apparently supposed to be found in the cabinet in the Lothering chantry that Ser Bryant gives you a key to, but according to the wikia, "* The boots are NOT always in the cabinet in the PC version. This is a known and confirmed bug with the developers." I know I've never found the boots there, or anywhere else. Link: http://dragonage.wik...Elven_Armor_Set

4) Ceremonial Armor Gloves have apparently not yet been found in game. Hopefully someone can find a broken reference to it in the game files and restore them so the armor set can be completed.

5) If you get the key from the starving prisoner in Ostagar, but never actually open the chest until it's no longer possible to do so, the quest will close, but the text of the closing entry that you get is very inappropriate (something like you refused to give him food). The entry that you get if you never ask him for anything to give him food is, if I remember correctly, perfectly appropriate under the conditions I've described, and should be the text used for the closing entry in that circumstance. (sorry I can't be more specific, been a while since I saw this one).

6) Depending on how you do the Harrowmont/Bhelen quests in Orzammar, you can fairly easily get permanently open quest entries. Related is this, from a wiki page: "Of Noble Birth: This quest will appear in any codex as a failed quest if you did not begin the game as a Dwarven noble after completion of A Paragon of Her Kind quest in Orzammar. To complete this quest successfully, you must begin the game with the appropriate background and then complete the quest by speaking to either Bhelen or Harrowmont about your son (whichever you are working with) before completing the main story quest." From the way this sounds, the codex entry probably shouldn't appear at all for any other background, but I haven't researched it in game yet. Source: http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Bugs

7) When turning in the golem registry at the Shaperate, you are told you are given an artifact but no item is actually received. This is most likely supposed to be the greatsword Shaperate's Blessing which cannot be obtained in the game as shipped. http://dragonage.wik...rate's_Blessing


Don't have a lot of time to play, but that's what I've found so far. Anyone spot any that I've missed? I did hear mention that there's a bunch regarding the epilogue if you're playing with a female character, but I'm unlikely to be finding those myself.

Qwinn

[WeeRLegion]

Is this only about dialogue and missing item bugs?

---

There's a bunch of graphics problems I've been running into, but I'm figuring those might be a bit difficult to fix?

Hm. I'll list them here quickly.
-The PC often keeps full armor on for the intimate scenes. It also sometimes happens to NPCs (their helmets, to be precise) during regular dialogue.
-While dualwielding, particularly with full-sized weapons in both hands, and having a bow as a secondary weapon, the PC will occasionally grab the left hand weapon instead of the bow, and start shooting arrows with it. It's of course pure kickass, shooting hurlocks with arrows. Fire from a mace. But it's a bit silly.
-This one I've only gotten once thus far; I was dualwielding, and my secondary weapons (bow and quiver) got attached to the regular weapon attachement points on the characters back, as opposed to the bow attachement points which are a bit lower. Looked very silly.

Edited by WeeRLegion, 20 December 2009 - 01:00 PM.

[Jarno Mikkola]

The characters can have their Attributes roll around the zero and not die. Example:

[Vicen]

I dont know if anyone else has had this happen but sometimes when I talk to ohgren he will have his helmet on the whole time till you say bye and then it will be taken off as normal heh

[Kulyok]

There's a long, long, looooong list. From the epilogues to game-breaking bugs, really.

(One game-breaking bug: in Human Noble origin, you get stuck in the main hall at night, if you talk to Ser Gilmore BEFORE he talks to you. The second door stays closed and unpickable).

I don't think there's no hope for a good solid patch, however. After all, the game is fresh, so the developers are bound to support it for some time, and they wouldn't be able to just shrug away all angry posts for those people who got the wrong epilogues or banters or items. Personally, stat exploit(re-rolling as above) and infinite gold exploit(hold both mouse buttons and drag an expensive item to the merchant's window, then buy it back via the normal way, repeat until you have enough money) make me uncomfortable, and I would love to have an official patch addressing it. I think it'll happen. They keep rolling out DLCs, don't they?

[Qwinn]

Is this only about dialogue and missing item bugs?

Those, and scripting bugs. Mainly because those seem to be the sort of bugs that never get fixed by most game companies for whatever reason.

Look at NWN: HotU. We've had how many patches since it released, and they -still- can't bring themselves to do the half-byte scripting fix that would fix the Aribeth romance? I can give a few dozen other examples from games all over the place.

The characters can have their Attributes roll around the zero and not die. Example:

I'm guessing this is analagous to what in the BG2 world would've been known as an "engine bug", and probably unfixable short of another Assembler-God like scient deciding to take a crack at it. But, still worth noting for the record in case one -does- show up, so thanks for the report.

(One game-breaking bug: in Human Noble origin, you get stuck in the main hall at night, if you talk to Ser Gilmore BEFORE he talks to you. The second door stays closed and unpickable).

I've actually found this in a number of places... odd behavior if there's a scripted dialogue meant to take place but for whatever reason it doesn't trigger until you've initiated dialogue yourself. Hell, I had the dialogue with the templar and desire demon in the Circle of Magi trigger and then retrigger 3 additional times in a row (sometimes with the templar missing) just because my party got far enough into the room before the script triggered that it activated once for each of my party members. Whatever areatrigger mechanism they've got, it really needs to get checked more often to prevent this. And again, unfortunately, that's probably an engine bug. I'm guessing it might have performance consequences too, and they probably decided on the way it is as a tradeoff. Still, it -could- be dealt with piecemeal in the most problematic places by adding some sort of "this can only happen one" checks to the dialogues, and we could certainly fix the above issue with the unpickable door in a piecemeal way.

After all, the game is fresh, so the developers are bound to support it for some time,

Oh, I have no doubt that they'll support it for a long time. They will crawl through sewers and eat infectious rats in order to fix the most minimal, unnoticeable gameplay issue (daggers are 0.001% less effective than they should be, quick, emergency patch!). They'll do this for years. But, if it is anything like previous games among virtually every game company, they will obstinately refuse to do all but the most egregiously bugged dialogue and story-mode quest patching. Just as another example to add to the NWN bug mentioned above, I discovered that Deekin in NWN2, when he moves to your keep, was scripted to have his store's inventory change once you upgraded the keep enough, including introducing a couple of decent and otherwise ungettable items, and it was basically an obvious single-byte scripting error keeping it from happening. I haven't checked, but I'm willing to bet that's still unfixed, several years later. I don't know why virtually every game company has this aggressive bias against fixing easily fixed dialogue, quest and scripting issues, but it's amazingly consistent. In some odd cases I can see how such fixes might screw up save games and they don't want to risk that, but in most cases that shouldn't be an issue.

(Actually, I did really extensive testing with another guy to determine what the rules are surrounding developing the keep in NWN2, and lemme tell ya, the whole thing is insanely buggy. It's damn near impossible to fail, really, as several of the key numbers go stratospheric long before they're supposed to. It was a -great- design, one I hope other games attempt, but the execution was seriously flawed.)

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 20 December 2009 - 12:37 PM.

[Qwinn]

In one of my playthroughs, walking up to Wade or the guy behind the counter for the very first time, already having scales in my possession, they acted as if I had already talked to them about scales. "Did you change your mind?" and all that.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 21 December 2009 - 11:39 PM.

[Pain Elemental]

Very near the end of the game, after I defeated the Archdemon, you get congratulations from everyone.
And guess who stood there; LOGAIN. Alistair chopping his head of apparantly didn't stop him from attending the ceremony.

[Kulyok]

Very near the end of the game, after I defeated the Archdemon, you get congratulations from everyone.
And guess who stood there; LOGAIN. Alistair chopping his head of apparantly didn't stop him from attending the ceremony.

Awww! Can we please exchange epilogues?

But, seriously, as I was saying in the other topic, I had the same thing with Cyrion, the father of my City Elf Female protagonist. He was killed by Tevinter slavers at my protagonist's request, and still he showed up, proud and happy as you please.

Really, the game has a very poor memory. For example, if Alistair is king and Arl Eamon is present in the epilogue, he speaks with concern about Connor - whereas we _saved_ Connor - Irwing himself did it. Or the codex, which says "Isolde sacrificed herself" - when she didn't. Or the codex telling my dwarven female protagonist that she had a son with another woman(noble hunters quest, Orzammar). Or Alistair saying before the final battle: "Hey, I'm going to be king!" - whereas he is not. Or the game mentioning Sten's death at Lothering when my protagonist doesn't even know who Sten is - she never talked to him. Or Anora mentioned as queen in the epilogue(when Alistair is king and PC is queen/his lover). Or NPC epilogues totally missing from the epilogue if PC is alive and Morrigan's ritual's been completed. And, naturally, Allison in Lothering, who always "forgets" you already gave her the traps.

[Cal Jones]

After waiting patiently for the price to come down, I bought DA today on Amazon (£14.99). Won't arrive until after Christmas probably - not a problem - but I'm wondering if it's worth waiting for a decent patch before I start playing. I've got other stuff I can play in the meantime.

[Lord Ernie]

Just to be a voice to the contrary: I've played through the game three times now, and I haven't had any of these issues. The game seems indeed to have an excellent memory, and stuff I kill stays dead (exceptions are, of course, "you didn't kill me, you just got me badly wounded enough to intimidate me").

Hell, my last playthrough I console-hacked my human noble into a mage with very few issues (the only one came at the end of the game when

Spoiler

my character wanted to convince Anora to marry him, but she recognized him as a mage

.

On the other hand, my gf claims that my experience with any given game is simply invalid, cause I seem to have the Epic talent "Dodge Gameplay bugs".

[Archmage Silver]

You can remove excess quest entries by opening your save game file in the DA Toolset, deleting the correct values and then saving the file again. It takes a bit of poking around the file structure, but I successfully removed an unnecessary quest entry from the Bhelen/Harrowmont quest line.

[Cal Jones]

I did the Juggernaut Armour quest and put it on (since that free dragon blood armour is fricken ugly) and my Warden didn't de-helm for cutscenes. So I took the helm off. His model was still wearing it. So I took the whole lot off and put the dragon armour back on - and he was still wearing the Juggernaut armour. Eventually I just put it on Sten, saved and reloaded and finally my Warden appeared in his dragon armour. Sten, meanwhile, did de-helm for his cutscenes so I guess it was just me.

[Eleima]

No, I don't think it's just you, I've had that happen with some my characters, from time to time, and for any type of helm (from the Juggernaut helm to a simple mage cap). It's a bit of a pain, but a save and reload usually fixes it for me.

[Qwinn]

Well, messing about with the toolset, I've locally fixed 5 bugs so far:

1) Infinite Sten approval exploit ("Why do the Quanri care about the blight?") fixed.

2) During Sten's sword quest, you could skip talking to Faryn altogether and go straight from the scavenger to Dwyn and know that Dwyn had the sword. Fixed.

3) Added Ancient Elven Boots to the cabinet in the Lothering Chantry. They are there in the XBox version but totally missing in PC version.

4) Allison in Lothering no longer forgets that you finished her quest to bring her traps.

5) When you complete The Shaper's Life quest, you will now get one of the Shaper's Blessings items depending upon class (warriors get greatsword, rogues get mace, mages get staff). I thought those items were meant for the Golem Rectory quest, but I was wrong: the missing reward in *that* quest is a Shale crystal if you have recruited him (you do actually get random loot if you didn't recruit him, as you were meant to). I'd have that fixed, except I want it to be a random leveled crystal, but that may be tough as you can't see DLC stuff in the toolset. I can make it a *fixed* crystal, like say "small brilliant fire crystal" if I have to, but I'll let it sit and see if I can figure out a way to randomize it.


A question: If you don't kill Loghain, do you -definitely- wind up recruiting him into your party, or is there a 3rd option? I'm pretty sure I've figured out why he's showing up in the epiogue when he's been killed (as well as a couple of other epilogue bugs), and if the only possibilities during the Landsmeet are that he's killed or he's recruited, then I think I can fix it pretty easily.

Cranking away at the rest. At this point, barring someone telling me there's a better way to do things, I think (if I wind up doing enough to make it worth a public release) I'll be releasing this as a separate module that extends the single player game, that way it doesn't litter the proper single player module's override directory. Should hopefully avoid a lot of hassle if it turns out that the next official patch fixes most of these bugs - then people can just play the Single Player Game without worrying about uninstalling.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

But, seriously, as I was saying in the other topic, I had the same thing with Cyrion, the father of my City Elf Female protagonist. He was killed by Tevinter slavers at my protagonist's request, and still he showed up, proud and happy as you please.

Just checking... does this mean that the city elf protagonist's father is one of the slaves that Caladrius either leaves with or kills to give you a CON boost, at the very end of the slaver compound quest? If so, sure, I can fix that for either circumstance, I've already found where it checks if he should be there and it *only* considers whether you are a city elf, no other conditions. He shouldn't be there if you let Caladrius take the slaves either, I take it.

EDIT: On the assumption that the above is correct, already figured out the plot variables and fixed the issue.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 18 February 2010 - 07:05 AM.

[Qwinn]

On the remaining issues you reported, Kulyok:

Really, the game has a very poor memory. For example, if Alistair is king and Arl Eamon is present in the epilogue, he speaks with concern about Connor - whereas we _saved_ Connor - Irwing himself did it.

I don't think this is a bug. I played through that myself, and I think that despite your saving Connor, something remains wrong with him... he's scarred or somesuch. Seemed like setup for an expansion story to me. If you can be more specific about what was the contradiction you believe you saw, I'll look further into it.

Or the codex, which says "Isolde sacrificed herself" - when she didn't.

I can't find where this could happen. You said Irwing was the rescuer when you got this? Only place I can see that codex entry coming up is when the plot variable ARL_REMOVE_DEMON_JOWAN_DOES_RITUAL is set, and as far as I can tell in the dialogues, that really is only set if Jowan does the ritual without the help of the mages, meaning she does die.

Or the codex telling my dwarven female protagonist that she had a son with another woman(noble hunters quest, Orzammar).

Urf. That one's going to be a pain, I can tell. Haven't played through dwarf noble yet so not really prepared to address it yet, I will play through as one soon though. (Only one I *haven't* done so far, actually)

Or Alistair saying before the final battle: "Hey, I'm going to be king!" - whereas he is not.

Just finished reading through the dialogue. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Nothing that can be done about it, really... if I were to close off all the options where his being king gets mentioned, the only ones that would be left are the ones where you *agree* to let him kill the archdemon. Still, it's not *that* bad, if you didn't harden him then he just says "Eh, I never wanted to be king anyway, let Anora do it" and if you did harden him, he says he *wants* to be king now. You're right that it doesn't really fit, but not much that can be done about it, unfortunately.

Or the game mentioning Sten's death at Lothering when my protagonist doesn't even know who Sten is - she never talked to him.

I can't find where this happens. I don't find any reference to Lothering at all in the epilogue slideshow. Where did the game mention this?

Or Anora mentioned as queen in the epilogue(when Alistair is king and PC is queen/his lover).

This one I should be able to fix, though it'll take a while to find, that epilogue slideshow is *huge*.

Or NPC epilogues totally missing from the epilogue if PC is alive and Morrigan's ritual's been completed.

I think this was, unfortunately, intended. I know, it sucks, but the feeling I get looking through them is: if the player is dead, then he/she can no longer influence their lives, so they can establish what happens to them. If the player *is* alive, I think they didn't want to write themselves into any corners in terms of their ultimate fate for the sake of sequels.

And, naturally, Allison in Lothering, who always "forgets" you already gave her the traps.

As mentioned, already fixed, along with the Cyrion-in-epilogue bug.

Still working on the Loghain-should-stay-dead bug.

Qwinn

[Archmage Silver]

On the remaining issues you reported, Kulyok:

Or the codex, which says "Isolde sacrificed herself" - when she didn't.

I can't find where this could happen. You said Irwing was the rescuer when you got this? Only place I can see that codex entry coming up is when the plot variable ARL_REMOVE_DEMON_JOWAN_DOES_RITUAL is set, and as far as I can tell in the dialogues, that really is only set if Jowan does the ritual without the help of the mages, meaning she does die.

Actually, I've had this happen. I picked the dialog options to further ask Jowan about the ritual, but turned him down at the end (after a companion interrupted the conversation). After that I went to get the Circle of Magi, and proceeded to follow through their quest line - all went smoothly, but my codex entry still states that Isolde died, although she obviously didn't.

[Qwinn]

That's *really* strange. As far as I can tell, the variable that *should* create that entry is only set one time, and at the very last possible moment when the ritual is about to begin. Either there's another variable out there copying that same codex entry that is mysteriously NOT in the plot that concerns all of this, or maybe some other option is branching toward that particular dialogue exit. I'll look around further.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Or Anora mentioned as queen in the epilogue(when Alistair is king and PC is queen/his lover).

Nailed it. This was in the Romance epilogue, where the PC marrying Alistair met the conditions for the "PC_LOVES_ALISTAIR_AND_NOT_EXILED" branch. (It's true, she loves Alistair and he wasn't exiled!) So, when the PC was Queen, you could get this:

As for <FirstName/>'s companions, they went their separate ways. Alistair remained in Denerim with his love for a time, much to Queen Anora's discomfort. He was eventually called to the far-off fortress at Weisshaupt, the home of the Grey Wardens, and swore he would return to his love's side soon.

And you could also get both Alistair and the female PC inexplicably abdicating their throne to go wandering off together and whatnot.

Unfortunately, this bit in the Romance subsection is the *only* exposition you can get of the fate of your companions if the PC lives as far as I can tell, so I don't just want to nix it altogether in the case of a Queen PC. So, I took a bit from the "no romance" section, added a preface, and this is what you'll get in that condition:

After enjoying the hospitality of King Alistair and Queen <Firstname/> for a time, the companions who had traveled with them eventually scattered to the four winds, drawn either by personal duty or the call to further adventure.

Everything following "for a time" is directly copied from the "no romance" section, I just added the bit before it cause it's pretty dry otherwise.

EDIT: BTW, just to confirm, a female PC can't marry Alistair unless they're becoming king and queen, right? No eloping while Anora rules, right?

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 18 February 2010 - 10:15 AM.