NORSE Oath of Blood Iron Will Quest Fix - Breaking The Bug
Nothing ruins a brutal viking rampage quite like your bloodthirsty enemies suddenly deciding they want to be your best friends.
The Iron Will quest is currently a complete mess and a notorious campaign killer. You march your warband in and tear through the first encounter feeling like an absolute tactical genius. Then you hit the second combat phase and the game just breaks completely. The hostile NPCs suddenly gain a conscience, turn friendly, and refuse to take damage. Since you have to wipe the entire map to trigger the victory screen, your playthrough grinds to a permanent halt. While the developers are dragging their feet on releasing an official patch, I spent hours bashing my head against this broken code. I found a few reliable ways to trick the system and force the game past this progression blocker.
The Turn Skip Exploit
This is the most consistent way I found to trick the game into letting you win. It requires a lot of patience and some obsessive manual saving, but it absolutely works.
Before you even attempt this, I highly recommend ignoring the Iron Will mission entirely. Spend your time upgrading your camp and grinding resources. Keep doing side content until the game physically forces you to start Iron Will to progress the story. Once you are locked in, create a manual save file immediately before entering the mission area.
Strategic Positioning
Push through the initial section until you pass the muddy bog area. The moment you clear the mud, drop another manual save. You are about to enter the completely bugged second combat zone.
Do not just throw your units down randomly. Deployment matters here to manipulate the broken enemy AI. Place your sister (the archer) in the absolute far left corner of the deployment grid. Take the rest of your melee warriors and stack them tightly on the far right side.
The Pacifist Strategy
Once the battle starts, look at the top right of your screen near the character portraits. You will see a turn counter that starts at three. You are going to do absolutely nothing for these first three turns.
Do not move. Do not attack. Do not even look at the enemy. Just press the space bar to skip your turn and let the enemies reposition. The magic happens in the save files.
The moment you load that third turn save, the game logic glitches out in your favor. Instead of requiring you to hunt down and execute all 11 enemies, the mission objectives update. The game will now automatically consider the mission complete after you defeat just 7 enemies. You can finally wipe out the hostile targets, ignore the bugged friendly NPCs, and press Enter to claim your loot and finish the section.
The Bridge Reset Trick
If staring at the screen and passing turns sounds incredibly boring, I found another method that forces the game to reset its combat state entirely.
Dropping Combat Aggro
Play through the first fight as you normally would. Once the initial bloodbath is over, gather your entire surviving warband and walk them back to the bridge on the exact same side where that first fight took place.
Force the game to start a new turn. You need to manually switch through every single character in your squad by pressing the Tab button. Make sure every unit registers their turn, and then save the game right there on the bridge.
Reload that brand new save file. When the game boots back up, you should notice that the combat UI is gone. You are officially out of combat. You can now walk your squad forward to manually initiate the second fight. The NPCs should render properly as hostile targets, allowing you to butcher them and finish the quest as the developers originally intended.
Alternative Desperate Measures
Sometimes the spaghetti code in this game is just stubbornly broken. If neither of the main exploits work for your specific save file, I have two other desperate tactics that yielded results during my testing.
The Far Right Flank
The bug seems heavily tied to the three archers positioned across the river. If you trigger their line of sight too early, the script completely shits itself.
To avoid this, I hugged the absolute far right edge of the map. Keep your entire warband pinned to the map boundary as you move toward the bridge. This keeps your squad completely out of the archers' range. By ignoring them and delaying their combat trigger, the second group of enemies sometimes loads in correctly without turning friendly.
Fixing Corrupted Save Files
There is a secondary nightmare attached to this bug. For some players, the game simply refuses to create a save file when you hit the save button during the Iron Will mission. It goes through the animation, but the entry never actually populates in your load menu.
If this happens to you, the exploit is impossible. You need to close the game entirely. Go into your Steam library, right click on NORSE Oath of Blood, open the properties, and verify the integrity of your game files. I found that the game sometimes corrupts its own folder in your Documents directory during this specific quest. Verifying the files forces Steam to download the missing script files, which finally allows you to save your progress and utilize the turn skip exploit.
