Paul Johns

I am currently playing a lot of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for XBOX 360, and although it’s a very, very long game it’s quite enjoyable and deep. I have to admit, though, it’s so long it makes me want to pick up Halo 2 again, and just play quick rounds through a game that doesn’t require a major investment of time to truly appreciate, but I digress.

(Warning! Spoiler alert for Dark Brotherhood quest!) I was playing through the Dark Brotherhood quest, you know, trying to be the highest ranking guild member or whatever, and along the way, I acquired the quest called ‘The Renegade Shadowscale’. Teinaava, an Argonian dark brother tells the tale of a Shadowscale who shirked his duties and quit being an assassin. So now Teinaava wants you to pop a cap in this fool’s ass, and bring back his heart as proof.

Now obviously, many people are going to go on this quest right after they get it, complete it, and come right back to collect their bounty. But not me. I decided to go ahead and continue with the main Dark Brotherhood quest, knowing I could always come back later for The Renegade Shadowscale quest, right? Wrong. Part of the Dark Brotherhood quest requires you to go back and (here’s the spoiler!) kill everyone in The Dark Brotherhood! Shocking, no? Ever the obedient assassin, I get down to business and off everyone in the ‘Hood. I kill the vampire dude, and immediately a quest that I was going to complete involving him pops up and says something like, “Since you killed off a quest character, the quest has ended here” and it went into my ‘Completed Quests’ section in the menu. The same should have happened when I killed Teinaava, but it didn’t, so I assumed that the quest would end in some other way when I went to find Scar-Tail, the renegade Shadowscale.

After I finished a few more quests, I started The Renegade Shadowscale, and I decided not to kill Scar-Tail. He is thankful, and he shares his gold with me and asks me to take the heart of this other, already dead Argonian assassin to Teinaava, and this is where the bug begins. I looked high and low, but there is no Argonian assassin. Using my on screen compass arrow thingie, I go right to the spot it’s pointing to, but there is no one there. I looked for probably 30 minutes in every nook and cranny anywhere near Scar-Tail to no avail. So I broke my promise to Scar-Tail and killed him, and took his heart. My quest updates and wants me to take the heart back to Teinaava, so I go back to the Brotherhood hideout and follow the green arrow, and it leads me to the exact spot where I killed Teinaava on some stairs. Obviously, there’s no body there, so I’m hosed. There is no way to complete this quest whatsoever, unless, of course I go all the way back to God-knows-when in my saves, which means I will have much to do over again for such a small side quest. As a result, this quest will rot in my ‘Active Quests’ lists forever.

So if you’re about to do the Dark Brotherhood quest AND The Renegade Shadowcale quest, don’t assume the game makers have thought of every possibility to ensure that every quest flows well with every other quest. It’s a huge game and I’m sure the beta testers had a lot on their hands, and they couldn’t catch everything. It would be nice, however, if they issued a patch to fix this through XBOX Live, but I won’t hold my breath. I may send an email to Bethesda to see if there is anything I can do, or see if there is any info on a message board somewhere. If you’re reading this and know of a fix, or have experienced the same thing, please leave a comment or send me an email. Thanks!