Is Dawnguard for PC Pretty Much Unusable?

[David Brasher]

My experience has simply got to be worse than average. First I couldn't get the quest to start at all. I went all over the place talking to guards and that did not work. Then after a ridiculous long time, I finally find Durok, but he is just a floating head. He has no voiced dialog and his lips don't move. So I go to see the Hall of the Vigilant and it is invisible.

 

I don't play mods that are this bad. I stop playing and send in an error report to the modder. But this here is a DLC made by professionals and I paid money for it. What is up with that?

[hector530]

sounds like mod conflicts. i havent crashed on my time with dawnguard Edited August 6, 2012 by hector530

[Rhutobello]

I don't play mods that are this bad. I stop playing and send in an error report to the modder. But this here is a DLC made by professionals and I paid money for it. What is up with that?

 

As a modder you should know that some mod conflict, or make strange behavior on other.

 

The game you have paid for is Skyrim and DG....this is the official release....and if you want to evaluate them, you need to play them clean of anything else.

 

If you put in something else then the official, then you can never know if the official is buggy or if it is the mod that create the havoc.

 

This happen all the time with the free mod, and it is nothing more strange when it happen when you have several mods combined with DG.

 

It can't be so that Beth need to investigate every mod created, and then make a mod that can take everything into account....play what you have bought...put in little by little and see if it works....that is what I try to do.

 

Many Modders are mad on players that complain that their created mod damage their games.....maybe this is the same case?

 

Said in general since it seems a lot of people have problems....I say in no way that DG is bug free.......but I think many are unfair toward it.

[com688]

I cant get my Dawn guard to work either

[David Brasher]

I don't use any mesh and texture replacers. I don't see how anything I have installed could cause missing meshes and textures and sounds with the official DLC.

 

I run a list of about 30 mods, many of them just patches for the other mods I run.

 

When I installed Shivering Isles it worked great. Almost nothing ever conflicted with it. When I installed Knights of the Nine, there were only like two or three small mod conflicts I ever found, and they were just annoying, not game-breaking. I may have had as many as 80 mods running around the time I used those DLC.

 

I am doubtful that all the other people who bought Dawnguard removed every single one of their mods before playing it.

Edited August 6, 2012 by David Brasher

[hector530]

verify game cache maybe? steam > skyrim > properties > local files

[Rhutobello]

I don't use any mesh and texture replacers. I don't see how anything I have installed could cause missing meshes and textures and sounds with the official DLC.

 

I run a list of about 30 mods, many of them just patches for the other mods I run.

 

When I installed Shivering Isles it worked great. Almost nothing ever conflicted with it. When I installed Knights of the Nine, there were only like two or three small mod conflicts I ever found, and they were just annoying, not game-breaking. I may have had as many as 80 mods running around the time I used those DLC.

 

I am doubtful that all the other people who bought Dawnguard removed every single one of their mods before playing it.

When a modder create a mod..he/she has a firm engine to work with....he/she can try it out....and when it work he/she can release it.

 

When a Game creator make a mod...he has everything to his disposition....and he can change everything...because it will be an upgrade on the official game itself.......it will therefor be new routines...and so on.

 

Even if Beth have released a CK they can't make their "mod" compatible with everything created....the CK is given free...you can play with it...you can create with it....but if new things arrive that makes the first obsolete...no one can complain...we have had our fun....I am not saying that none mod can work with DG....but if they don't work....well then it is to remove or upgrade.

 

No...from all the complains...few have started a new game.......but in fact...shall you have a valid complain toward a official release...then you have to play it clean of anything else...which in most cases will be to start from scratch :)

[jlemon96]

I had this same exact thing happen to me, now I'm playing it fine. What I think happened was during the downloading, something happened with the folder, so what I did was uninstalled Skyrim, re-installed it, and now I'm happily playing Dawnguard. I hope this helps your issue!

[kevkiev]

Of course, the modding thing is always going to be the main issue but from what I can gather on these threads Skyrim/ Dawnguard is simply a lot more fragile than, say, FO3 or FONV. There's always some degree of mod trouble shooting when a patch or DLC comes out, but the shear number of bugs being reported with Dawnguard is kinda staggering when compared to when DLCs came out for FO3 and FONV. My own noob-o-rama opinion is that it's the radiant quest thing that's built into the coding. It seems that Skyrim is way more susceptible to mod v. mod or mod v. game conflicts because there's just so much interaction among the gazillions of variables at play at any given time. A lot of times even where there's no apparent connection - witness the Breezehome "can't buy an alchemy table" bug with Dawnguard which, from what I can gather, hits even totally vanilla games. I wonder if even bethesda has a handle on what all is going on beneath the surface of the game.

 

So, yeah, mods will usually be the culprit but it seems like it goes to a whole new level with Skyrim.

 

All just my 2 septims.

 

So far in Dawguard, I've been pretty lucky. One CTD problem that I fixed by updating a mod, a quest follower (ie not an actual commandable follower) staying in sneak mode (snaps out of it when I go through a loading screen - same problem I had with Aela during the Totems of Hircine), and some map marker weirdness but in the big picture it's been working ok so far on the technical side of things. I generally run pretty simple mods though, and stay away from heavily scripted ones or major overhauls.

 

edit: I think the correct label for what I mentioned is "Radiant Story" not radiant quest.

Edited August 6, 2012 by kevkiev

[David Brasher]

More than an hour later I am back on track. Here is the solution to my particular problem: use the 30 mods I was using when I first saw the problem. Use BSAOpt to unpack the entire .bsa and install it as loose files. Leave the overridden .bsa in position. (You would think the .bsa could be removed at this point, but my game is working now and I don't want to touch anything and break it.)

 

I ran clear through my mods going from vanilla Skyrim all the way up to my full list of 30 mods and the missing sounds and meshes and textures never came back until I unpacked the .bsa with BSAOpt. (I fear that many casual gamers who are not mod-builders wouldn't think to do that or know how to carry out the procedure.)