Lethian's Crossing - bugged beyond any hope of redemption? (Minor Spoilers)

[Krigsprästen]

So, I reached Lethian's Crossing, I was running around there for hours - partly because of the completely insane loading times, even with a good SSD, but mostly because I did a lot of shopping, comparing stuff, orgaized inventory, made spells, updated spells, went through companion dialogues, etc. You know the drill, there's a lot of stuff that takes a lot of time, even when you don't do much.

First of all, there appears to not be a single quest. Not a one.

• I was talking to Harchiand Bronze about the Seal I found in Vendrien's Well, relating to the stolen/smuggled iron equipment used by the Vendrien Guard, and all I got was an update to an unrelated quest - a piece of evidence - and nothing to really progress things, even though the dialogue made it sound like something I should pursue.
  
  
• I found a "Note from Iron Guard Vintara" inside of the Lethian's Crossing Oldwalls Anthechamber, but again, this updates an unrelated quest - another piece of "evidence", although I cannot fathom why this'd count as evidence at all, it's not the least bit suspicious - and I cannot even talk to Iron Guard Vintara about it, even though it sounds exactly like the kind of thing you'd want to discuss with her.

But more frustratingly and more to the point, there appears to be no way to really progress. At all.

I've talked to the "village elder", Eldian, and he mentioned having the key to the Oldwalls, and he said that he sealed the Oldwalls because of problems with "the Bane" and monsters. But there's no dialogue to offer to help him, nor does he ask for help, nor can you ask for the key.

Yet the game updates the quest, saying "You will need to resolve Eldian's issue with the Bane in order to gain access to it."[i.imgur.com]

So, alright, that's weird. So I head over to the "Oldwalls Entrance", and it opens just fine, I go inside, and there's a door that cannot be opened. I find some glyphs to rub, and I read the rubbing, I find another room (why, why on Earth did that have to be it's own separate map?), I find another rubbing in that room, and somewhere along the way, the issue of getting into the Oldwalls and the quest to deal with Eldian's issues with the Bane has been mysteriously resolved, and the quest has updated[i.imgur.com]!

• I still can't talk to Eldian about the Oldwalls or the Bane.
  
• I never killed the Bane, nor talked to Eldian about killing any Bane.
  
• I cannot find the third rubbing, I assume that it's inside of the door that I also assume can only be opened by helping Eldian.
  
• I cannot get the key to get into the Oldwalls (assuming that is the door in the Antechamber, and that it's just not another bug, because the way everything was worded, I'm surprised I could even get into the Antechamber through the main entrance).

And yes, I realize I can cheat and bypass the entire thing, never getting into parts of the map, skipping past parts of the game, and just find the "correct" combination somewhere online, but I honestly really don't want to have to do that, for many different reasons, and I really shouldn't have to do that.

Ever since I left Vendriel's Well, there's been oddity stacked on oddity, and while Tyranny does quite a bit better and more interesting than Pillars of Eternity, it seems to have none of PoE:s (already uneven) polish, with some downright weird conversation options (with obvious choices sometimes missing), uneven reputation distribution, and I keep noticing something so basic as countless spelling and grammar errors.

I realize that that last one is almost petty to bring up, but I mention it because it's just so incredibly basic and it feels like Tyranny just falls flat in some basic departments. If I wanted to whine, I'd whine about how Tyranny manages to have even less companions than PoE, which already sported an utterly dismal number, in an even larger party, or how they've kept the Engagement mechanics and "solved" the "issue" of using tanks for blocking by utilizing teleporting enemies at every turn, similar to how it was "solved" in The White March, making combat even more of a random, unpredictable and largely nonsensical mess.

But either way, before I veer too far off course; is there any known way to resolve these bugs? I've been immersing myself in the magnificent world-building of Tyranny (although the egalitarian gender roles is utterly laughable, I'm loving the world, much more so than PoE:s world, and I love the take on "evil" along the roman-esque empire-building and (arguable) pragmatism) and hitting a dead-stop game-over bug on the first real area visited past the prologue is less than ideal and more than a little bit frustrating.

[HiddenWar]

The bugs in Lethian's Crossing are shocking. I'm playing on a Mac and the whole town is basically unplayable. Talk to Bronze = crash. Save game = crash.

[Krigsprästen]

I found some information about the "correct" way of doing this thing is to follow the entirety of the Bronze Brotherhood questline.

But, having supported the Disfavoured during the Conquest and thrown the Bronze Brotherhood out of the city (which was a pretty big "wtf" when I found out that this is practically their home - some information you'd think I would've had access to during the conquest, since I had no idea they'd take it so badly. During the conquest, they're described as being a random mercenary band that gets a bit rowdy while they stay in town. Seriously blindsided me), and since I had to attack the Bronze Brotherhood to get into the city, their leader barring my entry and then fleeing when I was forced to slaughter his companions (they had set up a blockade where they were collecting tribute from merchants), I have no idea what "the Bronze Brotherhood questline" is supposed to even mean.

This is seriously, seriously disheartening. I realize this makes me sound both entitled and whiny, but who the ♥♥♥♥ playtested this? D':

[LordBlade]

I've not had the problems listed specifically, but I have found that overall you can break quests by doing things out of order.

In the Oldwalls for example, where you find Garrick, if you grab the armor he would use as a disguise BEFORE talking to him, you are not given the chance to give it to him. You get the to point where he says he needs it, because because you picked it up first, you can't give it to him.

There's a number of other things like that I've encountered. Exploring first and picking up quest items before being asked for them seems to break quests. Which is pretty bad.

[ConductOfWar2]

You MUST do ashweald 1st (assassin missive quest), and then you the stuff that you miss

[Jotun]

"So, alright, that's weird. So I head over to the "Oldwalls Entrance", and it opens just fine, "

THAT is the weird part.
You're not supposed to be able to enter the Oldwalls until the bane helmet is forged.
You should go to the forge first and talk with the forge master (that's what Graven Ashe asked you to do in the first place).

[Gork]

I have the same problem with Lethian's crossing, but I think that maybe you need to finish one of the primary quests first.
Did you side with Disfavored, Scarlet or betrayed them? Then it seems you'll need to solve the edict of storms issue (disfavored) or finish the burning library (betrayal), dunno about the scarlet path.
I'm going to try to help the disfavored with edict of storms first and see if anything changes in Lethian's crossing. At least I hope something will change. :/

[Codester]

I went into old walls and claimed the spire before accepting the main quest there. The OPs problem is most likely he just didn't tell his archon that was the quest he was doing. Unless you specifically choose that quest while talking to your archon you can't progress in it. It's not a bug. Dozens of people have complained about the same thing, and when I told them that. They went and Actually got the quest and everything worked perfectly..

[Rev]

It's not a bug actually. It doesn't break your game at this point. Elder's stone opens outside door in which you have already entered (the one from Crossing into Walls). Closed door inside can be opened only from another side of it (as game hint tell you)

The thing with Crossing is you get access to it too early. You need to get quest from your ally - Disfavored, Chorus, rebels or somebody else - before things start to happen there. Things go differently depending on alliances, but generally the main questline will give you all the quests needed to find another entrance into Walls from another location. Then you will find third part of puzzle and get to the same closed door from enother side.

[Krigsprästen]

Originally posted by Jotun:

"So, alright, that's weird. So I head over to the "Oldwalls Entrance", and it opens just fine, "

THAT is the weird part.
You're not supposed to be able to enter the Oldwalls until the bane helmet is forged.
You should go to the forge first and talk with the forge master (that's what Graven Ashe asked you to do in the first place).

I have not been asked to go here by Graven Ashe, though. I'm here for two reasons:

• Investigate corruption (Tunon said this'd be a "good place to start").
  
• Check out the Spire, because after unlucking the first Spire, it tells me to investigate the others.

I haven't talked to Graven Ashe since before I claimed the first spire. The people at the forge have nothing to say to me at all. Well, nothing remotely of relevance, anyway.

And the quest just says that I need to deal with the Bane issue for Eldian (which we never talked about), which ends up resolving itself if I go into the Oldwalls and check out the glyphs/rubbings and the rune/teleporter room.

Originally posted by Rev:

It's not a bug actually. It doesn't break your game at this point. Elder's stone opens outside door in which you have already entered (the one from Crossing into Walls). Closed door inside can be opened only from another side of it (as game hint tell you)

The thing with Crossing is you get access to it too early. You need to get quest from your ally - Disfavored, Chorus, rebels or somebody else - before things start to happen there. Things go differently depending on alliances, but generally the main questline will give you all the quests needed to find another entrance into Walls from another location. Then you will find third part of puzzle and get to the same closed door from enother side.

This makes absolutely no sense given the information conveyed to the player. While it's probably possible to go about it that way, using other, unrelated quests to access certain areas, nothing suggests that it's intended to be resolved that way, or the current state of the quests being presently unresolvable, i.e. "we should come back later" (or, as noted in the OP, mysteriously solvable without doing anything relating to it).

This is either a bug, several bugs, or the single worst-written questlines and most broken quest-texts I've had the unfortunate honour of running into in 30 years of playing CRPG:s. I flat-out refuse to believe that this is intended behaviour.

Originally posted by LordBlade:

I've not had the problems listed specifically, but I have found that overall you can break quests by doing things out of order.

In the Oldwalls for example, where you find Garrick, if you grab the armor he would use as a disguise BEFORE talking to him, you are not given the chance to give it to him. You get the to point where he says he needs it, because because you picked it up first, you can't give it to him.

There's a number of other things like that I've encountered. Exploring first and picking up quest items before being asked for them seems to break quests. Which is pretty bad.

Oh god. As someone that routinely ends up doing things "out of order" for some reason (possibly because I like doing "everything" before I continue onwards to something else, such as talking to people, etc) this sounds like an absolute horrorshow.

[Lord English]

whats with the insane load times? I thought the game was crashing. Reminds me of the ol' Tandy days....

[Krigsprästen]

Originally posted by Lord English:

whats with the insane load times? I thought the game was crashing. Reminds me of the ol' Tandy days....

Yeah, it's very weird. It's even worse than Pillars of Eternity, which is saying something. You'd think that things would still be cached, but no, it feels like it reloads and rebuilds an entire area from scratch, loaded from some satanic hybrid of an HDD and a gramophone, each time you go into an area.

After having gone all across all of Lethian's Crossing at least four-five times, jumping in and out of areas, trying to find someone or something relating to the quests or resolving them, or even getting new quests of some kind, I'm willing to brain myself with a tire-iron out of frustration.

[Codester]

Originally posted by Luckmann:

Originally posted by Jotun:

"So, alright, that's weird. So I head over to the "Oldwalls Entrance", and it opens just fine, "

THAT is the weird part.
You're not supposed to be able to enter the Oldwalls until the bane helmet is forged.
You should go to the forge first and talk with the forge master (that's what Graven Ashe asked you to do in the first place).

I have not been asked to go here by Graven Ashe, though. I'm here for two reasons:

• Investigate corruption (Tunon said this'd be a "good place to start").
  
• Check out the Spire, because after unlucking the first Spire, it tells me to investigate the others.

I haven't talked to Graven Ashe since before I claimed the first spire. The people at the forge have nothing to say to me at all. Well, nothing remotely of relevance, anyway.

And the quest just says that I need to deal with the Bane issue for Eldian (which we never talked about), which ends up resolving itself if I go into the Oldwalls and check out the glyphs/rubbings and the rune/teleporter room.

Originally posted by Rev:

It's not a bug actually. It doesn't break your game at this point. Elder's stone opens outside door in which you have already entered (the one from Crossing into Walls). Closed door inside can be opened only from another side of it (as game hint tell you)

The thing with Crossing is you get access to it too early. You need to get quest from your ally - Disfavored, Chorus, rebels or somebody else - before things start to happen there. Things go differently depending on alliances, but generally the main questline will give you all the quests needed to find another entrance into Walls from another location. Then you will find third part of puzzle and get to the same closed door from enother side.

This makes absolutely no sense given the information conveyed to the player. While it's probably possible to go about it that way, using other, unrelated quests to access certain areas, nothing suggests that it's intended to be resolved that way, or the current state of the quests being presently unresolvable, i.e. "we should come back later" (or, as noted in the OP, mysteriously solvable without doing anything relating to it).

This is either a bug, several bugs, or the single worst-written questlines and most broken quest-texts I've had the unfortunate honour of running into in 30 years of playing CRPG:s. I flat-out refuse to believe that this is intended behaviour.

Originally posted by LordBlade:

I've not had the problems listed specifically, but I have found that overall you can break quests by doing things out of order.

In the Oldwalls for example, where you find Garrick, if you grab the armor he would use as a disguise BEFORE talking to him, you are not given the chance to give it to him. You get the to point where he says he needs it, because because you picked it up first, you can't give it to him.

There's a number of other things like that I've encountered. Exploring first and picking up quest items before being asked for them seems to break quests. Which is pretty bad.

Oh god. As someone that routinely ends up doing things "out of order" for some reason (possibly because I like doing "everything" before I continue onwards to something else, such as talking to people, etc) this sounds like an absolute horrorshow.

Yup. I was dead on. Unless you speak with Ashe. You will get nowhere. I thought that was the issue. The main quest there has to do with the forge. Which... is given via ashe or nerat. No bug here.

[Lord English]

Do you think it runs slow even on high end pcs?

[Krigsprästen]

Originally posted by Codester:

Yup. I was dead on. Unless you speak with Ashe. You will get nowhere. I thought that was the issue. The main quest there has to do with the forge. Which... is given via ashe or nerat. No bug here.

There's still quite evidently pretty major bugs here. The fact that you can push an entire area "out of sequence" and open doors that aren't supposed to be open-able yet, meet people and have conversations that makes no sense, or that the quest log shows things that haven't been said, just to then update without you resolving anything resembling what's described are all pretty major bugs.

The fact that you can work around the bugs to engineer a theoretical scenario in which the bug doesn't manifest itself, well.. duh. That's usually true for all bugs, in all games. Bugs almost invariably arise from doing things "wrong". Do things "right" from a point far enough back in time, and the bug(s) won't manifest.

It's especially obvious that these are bugs based on the fact that the game flat-out tells you to go to Lethian's Crossing. You get it as a main quest before you even go to Tunon in the Bastard City, and after having gone to Tunon and talked to him, you are further instructed to go to Lethian's Crossing as a good spot to start your investigation.

Or at least in my case, that's how it was, and it only made extra sense for me to go there since I was the Magistrate of Lethian's Crossing as part of my Conquest, and I wanted to see how it was faring.

It makes zero sense for me to take the 4-day-long trip from the Bastard City to the Iron Hearth, a location in the Blade Grave, the ass-end of the Tiers, when the game implicitly and explicitly tells me to go to Lethian's Crossing first, and when going to Lethian's Crossing, 2 days from the Bastard City, makes infinitely more narrative sense.

Originally posted by Lord English:

Do you think it runs slow even on high end pcs?

I wouldn't call my machine "high-end" these days, but the game actually runs fine in all regards, it's just the loading times that are insane (some people have reported up to 3-5-minute loading times for extremely small (hut/house-sized) areas, in hubs that contain multiple areas like this, many which have to be visited/exited multiple times). It's not that bad for me, but we're easily talking about a minute or so, on a SSD on a machine that beats the minimum requirements to death with a shovel before violating the corpse.

So it's pretty bad.

[ConductOfWar2]

Originally posted by Luckmann:

• I still can't talk to Eldian about the Oldwalls or the Bane.
  
• I never killed the Bane, nor talked to Eldian about killing any Bane.
  
• I cannot find the third rubbing, I assume that it's inside of the door that I also assume can only be opened by helping Eldian.
  
• I cannot get the key to get into the Oldwalls (assuming that is the door in the Antechamber, and that it's just not another bug, because the way everything was worded, I'm surprised I could even get into the Antechamber through the main entrance).

You CAN'T complete this BEFORE doing Ashweald (assassin missive quest)