Then it could have been a quirk in the game engine. In any case Lavok has been designed to be unkillable. He shouldn't even turn hostile when attacking him in his neutral state.
I've never solved a problem by being mean. I've solved a lot of them by being nice.
This.
But on topic, bugs are bugs, not be challenges players should have to learn as part of some metagame. I understand many games work that way in practice because devs never fix said bugs, so they wind up being tools used by the most hardcore players. This, of course, diminishes the gameplay by forcing competitive players into narrow niches of utilizing exploits. Or, in the case of Baldur's Gate, curbs roleplaying by arbitrarily cutting off a lot of the options a player has without any real logic - either you know that some choice will irrationally cause the game to screw up beforehand or you don't.
This is inherently a different type of foreknowledge than knowing a certain dialogue choice will piss someone off or give you a different quest ending. The latter example is an intended way of establishing tone and challenge; the former is a complete accident that could make the game unplayable entirely, contradict the game's internal logic, nerf certain playstyles/builds for no reason, cause graphical or scripting flaws, etc.
Thankfully this is 2016 and devs can fix bugs through patches. If the argument is "should devs try to fix bugs?" the answer is a clear "yeah, duh."
I'm really not sure what you're saying. Should the devs have to fix it if the player is dumb enough to kill certain NPCs? There SHOULD be consequences if you do things like using Melf's Acid Arrow on a quest npc.
If it were pnp , the DM would either fix the situation or have the players deal with the consequences of their actions, in a computer game they'd have to either save lavok or say "Killed a plot character, game over" . or call Biff (here I am, my, uh, sweetums?)
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But on topic, bugs are bugs, not be challenges players should have to learn as part of some metagame. I understand many games work that way in practice because devs never fix said bugs, so they wind up being tools used by the most hardcore players. This, of course, diminishes the gameplay by forcing competitive players into narrow niches of utilizing exploits. Or, in the case of Baldur's Gate, curbs roleplaying by arbitrarily cutting off a lot of the options a player has without any real logic - either you know that some choice will irrationally cause the game to screw up beforehand or you don't.
This is inherently a different type of foreknowledge than knowing a certain dialogue choice will piss someone off or give you a different quest ending. The latter example is an intended way of establishing tone and challenge; the former is a complete accident that could make the game unplayable entirely, contradict the game's internal logic, nerf certain playstyles/builds for no reason, cause graphical or scripting flaws, etc.
Thankfully this is 2016 and devs can fix bugs through patches. If the argument is "should devs try to fix bugs?" the answer is a clear "yeah, duh."