There's some quite retarded NPC behaviour in the "rescue tieflings/gnomes" quests, set in the prison basement of Moonrise Tower. [Spoilers ahead.]
The gnomes are supposed to have a plan, along with the tieflings. While you distract/fight the guards, the gnomes are supposed to break down the back wall of their prison cell (for which you're supposed to give them a bludgeoning instrument - I had an old maul handy just for wall breaking purposes), then run two cells along around the back and break down the back wall of the cell the tieflings are in, and then the two lots of them are supposed to make a run for a boat parked in a waterway out behind the row of prison cell blocks.
Fine, sounds like a good plan. You're given an option to say, "Ready, let's do this," you click it, but then before you can fucking do anything, the wee bastards start breaking down their wall, which alerts the guards and gets the Warden to open the cell doors (which I suppose makes sense as the guards are alerted to the prisoners escaping, and they'll want to catch them).
What happened to the fucking plan of letting US distract the guards FIRST, and THEN you break out while the guards are occupied? You fucking retarded little cunts.
Anyway, the shitshow has begun, so you start a fight with the guards. While you're fighting, the gnomes eventually break their wall, and move round back to break down the tieflings' cell's wall. But now that the cell doors are open, the fucking special needs tieflings, instead of waiting for the gnomes to break their cell's wall so they can get out the back way, decide to dash (while you're in turn-based combat, mind you, so each of their dashes takes a chunk of turn-based time) out their opened prison cell door, and run out into the walkway, into the gnomes' cell to go out the hole the gnomes made, via the fucking middle of your fight.
OK, ok, that's kind of retarded but you can see the logic, you can handle this. And the gnomes see it too, as they stop trying to break down the tieflings' wall, and start making a run for the boat. So both lots are now running for the boat, even though the tieflings have decided to go against the plan and run the long way round, out their cell, out front and out to the back via the gnomes' cell with the open wall.
Meanwhile you're keeping the guards occupied and preventing them from killing any of the stupid tiefling escapees who are now laboriously dashing right through the clusterfuck of you and the guards. But eventually they make it out the back (while you're still fighting the guards).
Whew, you think, this might just go well, after all.
BUT THEN, instead of continuing to run to the boat, the fucking gnomes STOP running to the boat, DOUBLE BACK to their fucking cell BACK through the hole in the wall, BACK into their cell, and start exposing themselves to the clusterfuck as well (and meanwhile the tieflings area nearly at the boats).
It's all a bit rickety and uncertain, like there are separate "tracks" (conditional on various choices you can make, ofc) for the things to happen, and they're not quite meshing properly.
OR you can just get rid of the guards first and solve the problem entirely.
Yeah that's essentially what I did just now. It was actually my first instinct, but I was confused by the dialogue option with the gnome, where you have the choice of "Ready, let's do this/wait a sec." IOW, you get the dialogue where he outlines the plan, and then the last two options are "1. Ready, let's do this" and 2. "Hang on a sec I'll be back" or words to that effect.
I interpreted those options as "1. I'm ready, let's do the plan, so now I'm going to distract/clear the guards, then when they're clear you break the wall and complete the plan, and I'll meet you out back" vs "2. Hang on I'm going to do some other shit then come back." But what actually happened was that when I said 1. they just started breaking the wall, thus alerting the guards. Ofc I could have said 2. and then cleared the guards, then come back and said 1., but the problem with that is that the collective sense of "Ready, let's do this" (I forget the exact wording but this was the meaning I got) implied to me that "we" were doing the plan
together, which included my clearing first.
But it seems that "Ready, let's do this" is simply THEIR cue to to break down the wall (
whether or not I'd distracted/cleared the guards) - and that's just counter-intuitive language, it seems to me, because of the implication that we're all jolly fellows in on this "plan" together
and we're about to execute it (from my guard distracting/killing through their wall breakings and runnings, to finish with meeting them at the boat)".
What the game actually wants you to do is use the "Hang on a sec I'll be back" as your cue to
either fuck off and do something else,
or distract/clear the guards, and then
come back, and as it were "manually" give them the cue to break the wall with the "Ready let's do this" option as their cue to break down the wall and execute the remainder of the plan. Effectively the "ready" there means "ready to meet you out back soon" and not "ready to execute the plan."
I tried the suggestion someone said above of breaking the walls myself from behind, but the devs must have changed that because it aggros the guards and the cell doors open, so now half the gnome/tiefling idiots run out front right into the loving arms of the guards, where you no longer are, and half run out the back to where you are. Complete chaos. So that doesn't work any more.
In any event, what I did was wait till the Warden was in her room admiring something in the back corner of her office (the room with the levers to open the cell doors), then I went into turn-based, closed the door (lol, just in case
), annihilated her on her own after a dialogue where she revealed they keep the valuables upstairs. (Incidentally, there's a bit of missing reactivity there, the gnome's weedy little hammer is upstairs in a chest - presumably that's handy if you find it first, e.g. by sneaking say, so you have a bludgeoning implement you can give to him, but I'd already given him a maul,. I picked it up anyway after killing the Warden, expecting to be able to give it back to the him at some point - but there was no recognition then back at the Inn. I wonder if there's a recognition if you find it earlier and it's the very bludgeoning implement you chuck to him in his cell? That would be cool.)
Then I got rid of the eyes and the other two guards, then I went back to the gnome and said (feeling like a chump), "Ready, let's do this" - the cue I thought was going to be the cue to execute the total plan, but was actually just the cue to get him to break down his wall/tieflings' wall, go back with them to the boat and wait for me.
It reminds me of how difficult it must be for devs to anticipate every damn fool action players might have, and how much room there is for misunderstandings that they can't anticipate.
Sorry for the miscroscopic analysis, but as a demi-autist I do find it interesting.
