Dragon Age is a superb RPG from Bioware, a game made even better by the recent arrival of the Dragon Age toolset, the exact toolset used at Bioware to create the game. This editor presents budding game designers with an incredible amount of power, allowing them to create completely original campaigns and modules however they see fit. On the downside, the toolset has the uncanny ability to completely break the standard Dragon Age campaign, as I so rudely discovered over the weekend.

I knew something was amiss when I started a new game and a few hours in I noticed that NPCs who should have been joining my party weren’t. Worse, cutscenes depicted conversations between invisible people. Sensing something amiss, I restarted a new game and soon discovered that all NPCs thought my male character was female, which was quite funny for a few minutes.

Doing a little snooping around, I soon discovered the cause of these problems: the Dragon Age Toolset.

If you’re planning on exploring the toolset, I highly recommend you wait until a new version is released, as all manner of things will go wrong if you don’t.

From Bioware Toolset Wiki:

Verison 1.0 of the Dragon Age toolset has a subtle but potentially devastating bug. Put simply, the core plot resources that were included with the toolset had different internal identification numbers (GUIDs) than the versions that were used when the retail version of the game was created. The result is that whenever a core plot file is exported it overrides the plot in the preinstalled main campaign, and then none of the other resources in the game are able to reference it any more. The game’s scripts and conversations are unable to determine the state of the affected plots, and are unable to update the state of the plot.

Let’s say you didn’t listen too me or your disovered this post too late. Is there was a way to fix your game without reinstalling from scratch? Indeed.

The first thing you’ll need to do is to remove the faulty exported plot files from your core override directory. You will find them here:

My Documents\Bioware\Dragon Age\packages\core\override

Delete the contents of this directory. Once they’re gone the game will revert back to using the resources that were originally included with the retail version.

If you have saved your game between exporting those core resources and now, the savegame will have faulty plot ID numbers recorded in it and remain broken. The savegame can be repaired manually but it will take a bit more work; if you’ve only lost a few hours of gameplay it may be simplest to just go back to a previous save and work from there.