A troll just came in to Riverwood, and proceeded to massacre everyone, does this happen often?
Is it a bug?
Because I still had quests active in Riverwood.

Not often, not a bug either. Dragon attacks happen more often and are way more dangerous/annoying. All you quest are belong to them!

I thought this was about trolling on this forum.

The attacks on villages aren't a bug, the fact that quest critical characters can be killed however definitely is, and a bug that has existed in all of Bethesda's games and in none of these games have they been fixed.

Quest critical characters really should be immune to death to prevent quest lines from completely locking down, either that or they should branch off into another path if the character is dead so that players aren't locked out of content due to random events in the game.

Sorry to disappoint


That was what I was thinking, I can find no one in the village except kids and soldiers. Which is a bit silly as in any walk of life the first to go are the vulnerable, but after a troll attacks it leaves all the kids??

Something similar happened to me. Got too close and Aggro'd a bear. Was falling back while flinging spells when wait what? Is that a... building?

Yup. Like the queen of all scumbags, I led the thing right into a town, where it proceeded to wipe out the children and other people before the guards realized what was happening. I felt bad, so O used my magic powers to, erm, rewind time. Thank the divines for Autosave...

There are trolls in Skyrim??

Are you serious? From your posts I thought you'd have played for a while now, you should have seen some.


Don't worry about children, the bastards are protected from all damage by the Daedric prince of Censorship.

Yup this was a frost troll, strange that it came down the mountain.
How long are you playing, if you haven't encountered any troll attacks? You gotta head to the hills

Not only that, if you stay on here, you might find some too!!

SARCASM

Much

I thought essential NPC's were supposed to return after 15 days or something? Its interesting to note though, because I did the werewolf quest for the Hircines hide or whatever its called and when I went over the quest in the Wiki's after I did them to see what if anything I missed, the fact that I wandered into the jail and met the werewolf and had not been directed there by the questgiver was frankly astonishing considering such things usually break the quests. So it seems to me that in some cases essential NPC's can die and there are still way to activate the quest. Now I wonder why this is not the case for every quest type. Oh btw the questgiver I had mentioned had died in the cemetary of that town after a Dragon attack.

@ paladinrja: essential NPCs can't be killed, they are instead rendered unconscious or are simply invulnerable. For some inexplicable reason though there are NPCs that are critical to some of the non-main story quests that can be killed before and during their quests and end up locking their entire quest line.

As I've said before, I used to be a games tester and this sort of thing is built into the test plan. Say you have 10 guys in a team testing the PS3. One will be doing a playthrough normally and nine will be rigourously testing a certain part of the game, as each of those nine completes their assigned testing their job changes from testing the game to deliberately trying to break it while they wait for the next build. The number of bugs I discovered from deliberately trying to break our game was impressive, including at least two major logic bugs that wouldn't having been found at all had I not been goofing around trying to break the game.

The first thing I'd do in an RPG with this level of freedom is try to kill quest NPCs, and if I would do it at least one of Bethesda's testers tried, so why can they still die? Either Bethesda were lazy and didn't flag those NPCs as unkillable, or they made a conscious decision to allow quest NPCs to be killed, lock their quest line and force the player to restart, I guess with replay value being Skyrim's biggest weakness they saw the bugs as a way to extend the life of the game, can't think of any other reason for this.

I thought it was known already that essential NPCs didn't die

I understand that. Course the other thing is that the tester was slacking off. Just being objective.

I'm not sure if it's a bug. In Oblivion people were complaining that too many NPCs weren't killable and I remember Beth saying that they made most of the NPCs killable in FO3 which made people complain also but this time on the opposite side of the spectrum to Oblivion.

My guess is with Skyrim they tried to balance this by making as many killable NPCs as possible without screwing up the game/main questline.

I've never had trolls enter a town though..actually sounds cool.

I've seen wildlife of all sorts enter a town, things like trolls never get passed the Guards. If hostiles level with the player is it possible that they can be tough than the guards? Forget Dragons, they are just uber dangerous.

Yup it was mayhem, all the guards held back with one just shooting arrows and all the kids running round the troll as normal

See, I think they should incorporate that..they shouldn't fix this one!

I agree, it adds realism (apart from the kids), but they should make any quest undo-able or have an alternate path.

It's not something I'd "fix". What I'd do is just make it like New Vegas, everyone can die, and you're just informed that you failed whatever related quests. That way it's all up to you. Immortal people kills immersion for me more than anything, and there are way too many immortals in Skyrim, not just the main quest characters, those I'd probably let be immortal.

Yeah, they should make them eat the chickens and dogs and all the people run inside or something.

Doesn't happen for thee main reasons

1: there are usually a load of testers, so what one doesn't spot another will. Developers however tend to be given a specific area to work on. So if a tester slacks off one day or isn't top of his game someone else will generally pick it up, if a developer slacks off or isn't top of his then the project suffers as a result because there isn't someone to back him up

2: games testing is an entry level position which many use to try to break into actual development, slackers don't tend to be given many opportunities in any industry, let alone one that requires the sort of work ethic that the games industry demands

3: the vast majority of testers are in temporary positions only so that they can be downsized immediately after release. The other side effect of this being that they can be dismissed without reason or notice and there is absolutely nothing they can do to defend themselves from that. If they slack off they'll be fired, not disciplined like a normal worker just straight up fired, they simply can't afford to take the risk


Objectively, logically, the testers cannot take any portion of blame. If a player finds a bug during normal play, then a tester will find it during normal play, let alone during the mind-blowing complex test plans that most AAA developers work with.