This quest always felt a bit useless to me, but then I never used the Dwarf multicannon at all; the initial 750k investment was way too steep for me until extremely recently, and these days I find I just don't need it. But we're getting an introduction to dwarves, which is nice.
We start off talking to a blustery old dwarven commander, who seems like a very trusting guy:
This is literally the first thing he says to me. Lucky for him I'm not a lunatic or anything. Of course I say that I want to join the Black Guard, because that's how quests work, and I receive my first task: repair the six broken bits of railing. Which bits are broken? We're not telling you, go pretend you're in a DOOM-era first person shooter and hump every bit of wall until something occurs.
This puzzle frustrates me for two reasons:
- There's no visual distinction between a piece of railing that's broken or not, so there really is no other way to proceed than to click every individual railing (of which there are about 30, by my count)
- In what I suspect may be a bug, there's no feedback of any sort when you click on a bit of fixed railing. I understand not wanting to flood the chatbox, but maybe give me something so I know the game hasn't glitched?
Anyway, I complete my grunt work and I'm back to the Captain for my next assignment: go check on some dwarves up a tree. Well, watch-tower; same difference. Unfortunately the guard is dead, so I take his body back to Cap, where I'm next sent in search of the dead dwarf's son, likely in the main goblin encampment.
Sidebar, but there's another scale theory issue here: Captain Lawgof is literally six game tiles away from the watchtower where I found the dwarf remains, and there are only like three goblins between him and it. It kind of feels like this dwarf captain may be a few cannonballs short of an artillery unit, if you catch my meaning, but I'll once again chalk it up to scale theory and move on to the goblin hideout.
Annoyingly, the entrance to the goblin hideout is well past the goblins themselves, on the other side of the Fishing Guild. It took me a hot minute to even think to check that far, so it seems like it could be moved closer. But maybe there's a technical reason. Luckily, once I'm there, the goblins don't perceive me as a threat, so I basically have the run of the place (though the giant bats are annoying).
No luck finding the dwarf child on my first skim, but I do find this which is weird:
It's not my missing dwarf, but it sure looks ritualistic. What the hell goes on in this cave?
Anyway, back to the search. The only things I've found so far are:
- A crack in the wall I can't squeeze through
- A staircase down that I can't enter (and the guards have no useful dialogue)
- A shit-ton of searchable crates
Lacking any better drive, I start searching crates. This at least gets the goblins to attack me, which suggests I'm on the right track. After a few crates, I find a hogtied child. I feel dirty just typing that, so let's move on as quickly as humanly possible. This is what the child's chathead looks like, by the way:
I have a cousin who went through a phase like that. I pity the kid's poor parents.
Back with the Captain now, and I've finally reached the point in the quest where the title becomes relevant:
Finally, about fifteen minutes into this quest, I'm actually dealing with cannons. There's a very short, very simple puzzle, and then I'm sent off to Nulodion at the Dwarven Mine to figure out how to fire the damn thing. Nulodion doesn't even have a puzzle for me, he just hands me an ammo mould and a book that says "use steel numbnuts" (I'm paraphrasing, barely), and sends me back to the Captain.
And then...quest complete?
Yeah, quest complete.
So, rhetorical question: what the feck did this quest have to do with cannons? I didn't like this quest, for the reasons I laid out above. But despite that, I feel like I should be praising it. For all of its faults, the purpose of this quest is to introduce a new mechanic into the game, the multicannon. I struggle to think of a comparable addition made recently (maybe the mining and smithing rework, or a new skill?), but if one was added I can virtually guarantee it wouldn't have this much of a framing device around it (Archaeology is a rare exception. I actually appreciate that the effort was made to make the multicannon part of the world, and give it a full introduction, rather than just dropping it on us.
I just with the introduction was better-designed, is all.