Cheat and Obey

"A little cheat while you turn away
Things we repeat one more time
Day after day

[...]

Go take my place
One more time
Then we can resume"

 

Shivaree - Little Black Mess

 

 

My recent triumphant return to Skyrim hit a small snag along one of the main quest's branches when the old pookven up on the mountain sent me to find a wordwall at Bonestrewn Crest, a location I'd already explored on my own several years ago, cluttering my journal with a broken quest. Gnashing my fangs a bit at the indignity I nonetheless pressed forward with my various other heroic epics, shelving the bug for later. That is, until the courier delivered me a note to find a wordwall at... you guessed it, Bonestrewn Crest.

 

Whew.

Okay, okay, deep breath, deeeeeeeep breath, not gonna get mad, just gonna keep dovahkiining things up elsewhere and not worry about those hideous unfinished quest markers. Let's see, what have the Companions been up to lately? Vilkas wants to hunt dragons with me? Right on my shaggy snarly brother, let us away to... oh, fuck me... nonononoNOOOOOOOoooooo!

(Bonestrewn Crest)

Yes of course it's bugged and doesn't complete upon the dragon's death. How could it even be otherwise?

So at about this point I started wondering why that location name rings a bell from way back six years ago. Oh, right: that one dragon whose death animation doesn't trigger its actual death and continues hammering you with attacks as an invincible supersonic flying skeleton had spawned at... where else but muddafuggin' Bonestrewn Crest?

Let's recap: that's at least four bugs in one location in one playthrough, unaddressed since the game's launch, and while I could just leave the word wall quests unfinished, being permanently stuck with Vilkas in tow would prevent me from completing any stealth-based content so it definitely falls into game-breaking territory and can only be fixed by CHEATING and autocompleting via console commands.

Never ask me to cheat.

Admittedly, Skyrim boasts a pretty good success rate in bug-squashing considering its staggering scope, the content amounting to entire series' worth of other games, but when it fails it fails spectacularly. Bonestrewn Crest is not just bugged in itself, but as far as I can tell one of its problems is not setting completion flags correctly, and thus acts as a magnet for other bugs as well, like the word wall quests which apparently lack a separate flag for locations already visited.

Here we edge from a justifiable margin of error (though after so many years, someone should really be taking another look at this pile of hardcoded incompetence that is Bonestrewn Crest) into developers' disdain for their own customers. Ensuring word walls are flagged separately from (respawning) dungeon completion should've been a core feature of those quests. Did no-one at Bethesda think RPGamers might explore all they could before tackling the climactic epic? Is polishing off side quests before the main event not a core RPG strategy since the '70s? Did you expect me to run clapping my handsies in excitement to execute the greybeards' edict as soon as I got it just because you slapped a damn quest marker on my map?

See, we keep returning to my chief gripe with Skyrim: instead of making the most of its sandbox side (which was TES' claim to fame anyway) it was retooled to appeal to tools, to morons who do what they're told, who chase quest markers instead of plotting their own course in a brave new world.