by pridefall » Fri Aug 07, 2015 1:19 pm
Major NPC Bug - The route to interacting with "Good" Alexandra is permanently locked off from interaction if players "Submit" to her as their first action during their first meeting,
Description: When encountering the NPC Alexandra as part of her introduction sequence, players may block her "Good" route if choosing to "Submit" to her as the first action of their fight. Any subsequent meetings you have with Alexandra are then subsequently bugged--if a player decides to "Submit" or "Throw The Fight" upon meeting her again, the game will simply respond by repeating the following chunk of bugged dialogue:
"You drop your fighting stance and put your arms up, surrendering to the strange cop woman. For a moment, you think she's going to go all 'police brutality' on you or pull some sexy 'bad cop' routine, but instead she just looks you over briefly. "It's good to see that you've still got some control in there. Things are really crazy out there right now. Do you still remember your name? Where you lived and worked?" She asks you some basic questions, not to get the information but to make sure you can still remember it (Dialogue repeats->) You drop your fighting stance and put your arms up, surrendering to the strange cop woman. For a moment, you think she's going to go all 'police brutality' on you or pull some sexy 'bad cop' routine, but instead she just looks you over briefly. "It's good to see that you've still got some control in there. Things are really crazy out there right now. Do you still remember your name? Where you lived and worked?" She asks you some basic questions, not to get the information but to make sure you can still remember it. "You need to keep it together until rescue can come," she continues, tapping you firmly on the shoulder. "I want you to return to your home, take cover and wait this thing out. "You need to keep it together until rescue can come," she continues, tapping you firmly on the shoulder. "I want you to return to your home, take cover and wait this thing out." And with that said, she turns and heads off, leaving you feeling a little more focused.
(As you can see, at where the first part of the "Loss" scene dialogue should continue ("...still remember it" going to: "You need to keep it..."), it instead cuts off (with three spaces) and goes back to repeat the beginning of your "Submission" by saying: "You drop your fighting stance..." again. After doing this, it then completes as normal. This will happen every time you "Submit" or "Throw the Fight" after the initial meeting which caused the bug, persisting even after Restoring to an earlier Save or using even a clean Word Save created at the beginning of the game.)
I replicated the bug over twenty times in Inform 7, and found that only recompiling the entire game from scratch would allow a player to "reset" Alexandra. Nothing else can be done with the NPC locked like this, forcing players to either ignore her or force her "Bad" Route to happen for continued interactions.