Unable to absorb Dragon soul in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Ameu]

Hello guys I have started playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim game but I found the some bugs during playing. Last night while playing I killed a dragon at a location I had already technically "cleared". When I walked up to the dragon I had killed, I wouldn't absorb its soul. Is this because I've already killed this area's dragon? I know they spawn at random but they also seem to definitely be at the marked locations.

[Daksha90]

I have been having the same problem and i currently have 0 souls absorbed. it seems to only be happening with the dragons that just have the generic name of "dragon". I can absorb its soul if it has 2 names like blood dragon and frost dragon. I still can’t tell if this is supposed to be a glitch of something that is supposed to happen. From what I've read so far on articles there is a cap on the number of unused souls you can have (5 or 6). You need to spend them on shouts before you can absorb more.

[Chakradevroy]

Not a problem of absorbing a soul however I can't get a world from the world wall by one of the Daedric lord statues. It's the one the quest points you towards. I had this happen at Kyngrove (?), with an unnamed dragon, where a guard landed the killing strike. No soul absorption. I loaded again and took care to finish it myself, and then it worked. I also killed the dragon at the Western Watchtower near Whiterun twice (it seems to respawn there?) and could absorb his soul both times.

[GaganGang]

Were you close enough to the dragon to absorb the soul? From what I've heard, you need to be within a certain distance for the soul of non-mission dragons to be absorbed. And if you miss it once, you're out of luck; hitting the corpse won’t do anything for yah.

[melishous]

I just had the same thing happen with a Blood dragon, tried twice to kill it, loaded again then I did a "Wait" when the dragon came at me it was now a Frost Dragon I killed it and got the soul. Hope this helps you. ^_^ (Gotta love Bethesda and their bugs >.<;;; )

[IAMKing]

I have the exactly same issue as listed above. The dragon soul I can't absorb is located at Skyborn Altar, and the name of the dragon is simply "Dragon". I tried killing it in many different ways, arrows, melee, spells, but the corpse is just laying there. I came back a lot later to try it again, same glitch happened... Hasn’t had the same issue with any other dragons.

[Enos]

no worries - I had a similar problem on PC and I was freaking out thinking there was no way for me to learn new shouts.

[DougWison]

I think I need to get checked. I'm playing on Xbox, and instead of pressing A, like I did, I would've pressed

[Idk000000]

I have been having the same problem and i currently have 0 souls absorbed. it seems to only be happening with the dragons that just have the generic name of "dragon". I can absorb its soul if it has 2 names like blood dragon and frost dragon. I still can’t tell if this is supposed to be a glitch of something that is supposed to happen. From what I've read so far on articles there is a cap on the number of unused souls you can have (5 or 6). You need to spend them on shouts before you can absorb more.

That can't be right. I had 14 Dragon Souls built up and it just now glitched on me.

[bitburner93]

I think this is a result of what I call the "Bethesda Twitch" (because it happens in pretty much every single game they make that I have played)

Sometimes when you kill a creature - that creature starts to "twitch" on occasion - this happens with dragons, protectrons in Fallout 3 and FO NV, sometimes it happens with Raiders in fallout - and it happens with various types of props and models in Oblivion, rinse and repeat...

If the dragon is twitching or does not become stationary within a certain period of time after it is defeated - then the soul will never comith.

I love that bethesda focuses on features over bugs because it makes the story and things you can do in their games absolutely amazing - but some of these (like the Lag and Freeze issues I have experienced playing their games on any console) have been around since Oblivion and FO III - they appear to have something to do with memory leaks by they way they behave (because restarting clears the used up ram and fixes the problem) either that or they are not letting go of a resource someplace in their engine - it sucks and I hope someday that they actually fix it.

I have heard however that their PC games don't have the same issues (as much). I sympathize with the Bethesda team however - it's bad enough writing code for websites that have to run in multiple browsers - I can't even begin to imagine the ugliness they have to put up with trying to get a game to run on multiple pieces of hardware made by different people. Yeeeshh!

[Saliece]

I thought it might have been the same thing, the "Bethesda twitch (great name for it by the way), but recently the dragons I have brought down seem to have no latent animation. I've been having the glitch for a couple weeks now trying to discover a common donominator for a pattern and can't seem to identify one. Names vary, locations vary, cleared sites vs. Immediatly discovered varies, type of attack, reloads... its driving me crazy. Its also more frequent now so if someone doesn't figure out how to fix it soon I'm going to have to stop unlocking my words.

[Ninja-X]

I thought it might have been the same thing, the "Bethesda twitch (great name for it by the way), but recently the dragons I have brought down seem to have no latent animation. I've been having the glitch for a couple weeks now trying to discover a common donominator for a pattern and can't seem to identify one. Names vary, locations vary, cleared sites vs. Immediatly discovered varies, type of attack, reloads... its driving me crazy. Its also more frequent now so if someone doesn't figure out how to fix it soon I'm going to have to stop unlocking my words.

There was a similar bug mentioned on the elderscrolls wiki that "Dead dragons may sometimes re-spawn. You will not earn souls for killing a dragon who's soul you have previously absorbed." So, till the time they release a patch for it, we will have to face this annoying bug at the moment.

[Saliece]

There was a similar bug mentioned on the elderscrolls wiki that "Dead dragons may sometimes re-spawn. You will not earn souls for killing a dragon who's soul you have previously absorbed." So, till the time they release a patch for it, we will have to face this annoying bug at the moment.

That figures. Its not enough that they "randomly" appear almost every time I fast travel but, I get to kill it twice. Thanx for the headsup at least.

[bitburner93]

I thought it might have been the same thing, the "Bethesda twitch (great name for it by the way), but recently the dragons I have brought down seem to have no latent animation. I've been having the glitch for a couple weeks now trying to discover a common donominator for a pattern and can't seem to identify one. Names vary, locations vary, cleared sites vs. Immediatly discovered varies, type of attack, reloads... its driving me crazy. Its also more frequent now so if someone doesn't figure out how to fix it soon I'm going to have to stop unlocking my words.

Yeah after I posted this, within a couple of weeks I ran into a couple of cases where it stopped being consistent (no movement on the model/prop but still no dragon soul) - it only happens about 1 out of 10 times so I guess I can live with it (that bug is the least of my issues when playing Skyrim or any other Bugthesda games for that matter.

As for the bugs that are harder to ignore (i.e. the lag on PS3 or XBox for some users). I wouldn't hold my breath on a fix that will take care of all of it - every single game they make does this or some variation of it (at least the ones I have played anyway which include Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Oblivion and Skyrim). Oblivion is over 5 years old and the fact that end users are writing patches for it (the unofficial oblivion patch for example) just shows that Bethesda's team has checked out on doing anyting with oblivion (which is fine - the game is old, it's time to move on, but at least fix the game breaking bugs - I couldn't even finish the Dark Brotherhood Quests because the guy I am supposed to take out in Leyawin never shows up - ever). I still have lag on oblivion from time to time (albiet not as bad as fallout 3 or fallout nv) it's consistent with all of them in how it occurs. The worst is when the game completely locks up and I have to restart the console (that happens at least once every 4 hours). Hell, ive been using Windows as an operating system for the last 20 years, so I am plenty used to restarting things when they stop working. But it still sucks...

Since Bethesda builds games that run on multiple platforms - maybe they should make use of some OOP design patterns in their software (FWIW - they probably are - but I have worked with game developers before, the ones I have met have historically always hated using patterns like the stuff from the GoF book etc... mostly because there is a minor time investment in being disiplined enough to use them consistently throughout the code). Nothing bad against Game Developers, you all make the world a better place the only reason I say that is because I haven't met any GSD's who do like these kinds of patterns, I digress; for example an IoC container that loads the memory management modules based on the platform (i.e. a memory manager for PS3 - a different implementation for the XBox - etc...). At the very least it would make their code easier to maintain and give some resuability for later games, which in turn would make it easier to make the release date without letting out a bag of dogfood.


And I thought Micro$oft was bad with releasing bug laden software...

[XZS2JH]

Were you close enough to the dragon to absorb the soul? From what I've heard, you need to be within a certain distance for the soul of non-mission dragons to be absorbed. And if you miss it once, you're out of luck; hitting the corpse won’t do anything for yah.

In Skyrim, i am a level 51 Breton, and i go around finding places, to be exact, dragons. Just now, i fought an ancient dragon (my 4th ancient ones... they hurt a lot..) in an area i already "cleared"... after i killed it, i stood right next to him, but i couldn't absorb his soul... i play on PC, and since i didn't save it for a while, i decided to just type in the code "resurrect" to fight it again, (i don't use cheat codes, but this time i really got annoyed,) and see if i can absorb it if i killed it again... i couldn't absorb it yet again... any suggestions? it's not the distance..