UESP Forums

Hi, everyone! First time here. I've read a lot of the UESP and other FAQs and getting-started info for Daggerfall, as well as known bug lists and such, but I'm still stumped about what's going on.

I understand that it can be hard to find quest objects, and even harder to be sure you've searched all tentacles -- er, corners -- of a dungeon. But I'm on about my third quest where I've gone to a dungeon, spent (admittedly enjoyable) minutes or hours scouring the place, and never actually found anything to solve the quest. In fact, I have yet to successfully complete a dungeon quest. (Granted, I'm still 2nd level.)

Right now it's happening to me on a Defamation quest. I'm sure I'm in the right dungeon (Hold of Gaerham, not that it matters), and I'm sure I've been to all the quest-object locations because I finally broke down and went into cheat mode. Turns out I'd already been to them all legitimately, and there was no lover in any of them.

The first time this happened to me (trying to kill an escaped imp for the Mage's Guild), I thought maybe I'd accidentally let the quest expire or something, and just moved on. It happened again with another quest; now this is the third time, and I'm really starting to wonder. To test the expiration theory, I went back to a save from right after I was told to go the dungeon, went straight there, and immediately paged through the locations in cheat mode; no luck.

I'm on plain-vanilla GOG fall.exe, which I've read might have quest bugs, but nothing like this seems to be listed on the patch pages. Am I missing something? Thanks for any insights you can provide!

Outside of quests expiring I'm not aware of any bugs that would cause quest goals to disappear or not appear. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but it's possible your save files are corrupted. I've gotten some pretty weird bugs as a result of bad save file data, and quest objectives failing to appear wouldn't seem entirely out of the ordinary to me.

My recommendation would be to go back to earlier saves and try getting more quests. If you don't have any saves left from before the problems started to happen then it's possible that you'll have to start your game over again; this is why anyone who plays unpatched daggerfall will tell you to keep vigilant backups.

My advice for right now is back up your existing saves, start a new character from the beginning, and see if the problem persists. If it does then the good news is your save files are fine, but the bad news is you have a problem outside of my ability to diagnose but maybe someone else here on UESP has a solution.

ADDENDUM:
Remember to also try running FIXSAVE and see if that can recover your save files before you go deleting stuff. It doesn't always work, but it's saved my bacon more than once.

This sounds a lot like the old "Invisible Quest Item Bug" which was prevalent when DF was first released for free into the wild years ago. It was due to folks trying to run the game without DOSbox or other DOS emulator--they were just running the game straight from windows. So my first question would be Are you using DOSbox to run the game?

Also, research shows that the GOG install file is crap. Like, buggy crap. use the DaggerfallSetup installer (which is already patched)