New Pale Justice/Voice of Durdel Anatha bug: do NOT talk to Nym after finishing the quest!
UncleSporky
Member Posts: 100
I had heard that in the EE, Pale Justice was changed so that you had to complete a quest before you could get it. I looked up the details of this quest online, and it sounded like something that had tripped up a lot of people and either bugged out or had very strict requirements. I was led to this thread on this forum, which has a lot of frustrated accounts and an exact set of steps to follow to get the sword, which I followed.
As noted in that thread, if you destroy the idol then it also destroys the Voice of Durdel Anatha and ruins your ability to complete the quest, which blocks you out of a 630,000 XP reward and the Glory of Suffering armor, and it was thought this could affect Pale Justice as well. You can't tell Durdel Anatha the truth he needs to hear unless you've heard Nym's story, AND you've talked to Harken. And if you've talked to Harken, you're already in the temple and likely to press forward and destroy the idol there. That's what leads most people to have to rush up to Durdel Anatha the moment Harken summons him again...technically, you should be able to kill Durdel, leave the room, and then tell Durdel the next time you see him elsewhere. But that's an odd sequence of events to stumble on.
In any case, I followed these steps and completed the quest successfully...so imagine my surprise when I went to the artisan's district and the umber hulks refused to spawn, and the way to Pale Justice remained shut. I wandered around for a while, killed everything, left, came back...nothing.
This was pretty frustrating because I thought I'd done everything right and avoided some of the pitfalls that others ran into, and earlier saves I had before doing the quest were pretty far back and would be annoying to redo...
So I dove into the game's code to see what was going on.
In the AR8009.BCS script (the script for the artisan's district), the section dealing with Pale Justice goes like this, which I've commented for clarity:
IF
GlobalLT("Voice_Quest","GLOBAL",2) //If you haven't yet revealed the truth to Durdel Anatha,
Global("CDPaleJustice","AR8009",0) //and the Pale Justice variable is 0 (which it is by default),
THEN
RESPONSE #100
TriggerActivation("HulkTrap1",FALSE) //then it's impossible to trigger the hulks,
SetGlobal("CDPaleJustice","AR8009",1) //and set the Pale Justice variable to 1.
END
IF
GlobalGT("Voice_Quest","GLOBAL",1) //If you've dealt with Durdel Anatha,
Global("CDPaleJustice","AR8009",1) //and the Pale Justice variable is 1,
THEN
RESPONSE #100
TriggerActivation("HulkTrap1",TRUE) //then it's now possible to trigger the hulks,
SetGlobal("CDPaleJustice","AR8009",0) //and set the Pale Justice variable back to 0.
END
This makes sense and does function. And in fact this even works if you don't complete Durdel's quest properly and instead just destroy the idol, because doing so sets Voice_Quest to 100, which is greater than 1 like the code checks for. It just wants him dealt with one way or another.
The problem is...if you finish the quest and then go talk to Nym again, when he hints about how Dorn's Deep's treasury wasn't all that secure and you reply "wait, what are you getting at?" ...It sets Voice_Quest back to 1 again. As if you'd never completed the quest, nor destroyed the idol. And at that point there is no way to increase that quest variable again.
You can even find yourself in this situation with the seemingly innocent path through Dorn's Deep of finding your way to the temple first and destroying the idol, then finding the svirfneblin village and talking to Nym before you visit the artisan's district. You would never know that you'd done anything wrong.
So you need to go get Pale Justice the moment you "unlock" it by dealing with Durdel Anatha one way or the other, and never talk to Nym about his history again, or it un-completes the quest for you and blocks off Pale Justice forever. This also has the side effect of making Harken think he still has control of the Voice and he keeps threatening the party forever, even when he should be cured.
The simplest way to fix this would be to make a new variable, something like Nym_truth set to 1 when you speak to him, and then your dialogue with Durdel could check for that instead of the quest stage.
As noted in that thread, if you destroy the idol then it also destroys the Voice of Durdel Anatha and ruins your ability to complete the quest, which blocks you out of a 630,000 XP reward and the Glory of Suffering armor, and it was thought this could affect Pale Justice as well. You can't tell Durdel Anatha the truth he needs to hear unless you've heard Nym's story, AND you've talked to Harken. And if you've talked to Harken, you're already in the temple and likely to press forward and destroy the idol there. That's what leads most people to have to rush up to Durdel Anatha the moment Harken summons him again...technically, you should be able to kill Durdel, leave the room, and then tell Durdel the next time you see him elsewhere. But that's an odd sequence of events to stumble on.
In any case, I followed these steps and completed the quest successfully...so imagine my surprise when I went to the artisan's district and the umber hulks refused to spawn, and the way to Pale Justice remained shut. I wandered around for a while, killed everything, left, came back...nothing.
This was pretty frustrating because I thought I'd done everything right and avoided some of the pitfalls that others ran into, and earlier saves I had before doing the quest were pretty far back and would be annoying to redo...
So I dove into the game's code to see what was going on.
In the AR8009.BCS script (the script for the artisan's district), the section dealing with Pale Justice goes like this, which I've commented for clarity:
IF
GlobalLT("Voice_Quest","GLOBAL",2) //If you haven't yet revealed the truth to Durdel Anatha,
Global("CDPaleJustice","AR8009",0) //and the Pale Justice variable is 0 (which it is by default),
THEN
RESPONSE #100
TriggerActivation("HulkTrap1",FALSE) //then it's impossible to trigger the hulks,
SetGlobal("CDPaleJustice","AR8009",1) //and set the Pale Justice variable to 1.
END
IF
GlobalGT("Voice_Quest","GLOBAL",1) //If you've dealt with Durdel Anatha,
Global("CDPaleJustice","AR8009",1) //and the Pale Justice variable is 1,
THEN
RESPONSE #100
TriggerActivation("HulkTrap1",TRUE) //then it's now possible to trigger the hulks,
SetGlobal("CDPaleJustice","AR8009",0) //and set the Pale Justice variable back to 0.
END
This makes sense and does function. And in fact this even works if you don't complete Durdel's quest properly and instead just destroy the idol, because doing so sets Voice_Quest to 100, which is greater than 1 like the code checks for. It just wants him dealt with one way or another.
The problem is...if you finish the quest and then go talk to Nym again, when he hints about how Dorn's Deep's treasury wasn't all that secure and you reply "wait, what are you getting at?" ...It sets Voice_Quest back to 1 again. As if you'd never completed the quest, nor destroyed the idol. And at that point there is no way to increase that quest variable again.
You can even find yourself in this situation with the seemingly innocent path through Dorn's Deep of finding your way to the temple first and destroying the idol, then finding the svirfneblin village and talking to Nym before you visit the artisan's district. You would never know that you'd done anything wrong.
So you need to go get Pale Justice the moment you "unlock" it by dealing with Durdel Anatha one way or the other, and never talk to Nym about his history again, or it un-completes the quest for you and blocks off Pale Justice forever. This also has the side effect of making Harken think he still has control of the Voice and he keeps threatening the party forever, even when he should be cured.
The simplest way to fix this would be to make a new variable, something like Nym_truth set to 1 when you speak to him, and then your dialogue with Durdel could check for that instead of the quest stage.
Post edited by UncleSporky on
0
Comments
I checked the Dialogue tree in Nearinfinity and it expects you to have the "The Voice's Bones" in your inventory as well as Voice_Quest 2 when talking to Calliana. So talking to Nym will also break this part of the quest as it sets Voice_Quest to 1. Thankfully this was easily fixed with EEkeeper by just setting Voice_Quest to 2 manually.
Still if anyone ever encounters these issues, Just know to avoid talking to Nym about his past until you are completely done with the quest, with the sword and the quest itself.