(Xbox) - Shimmerene Waterworks - Crashes Game and/or Console - Blocks progress + locks character

Feranth

I found it somewhat incredible that I wasn't able to find another topic with the issue yet as it seems to be widespread and reported upon on Twitter and Reddit...but I'll do my part here I guess!

Whenever one enters Shimmerene Waterworks in Summerset, which is required for the quest 'A Tale of Two Mothers', the game either crashes or locks up the entire console. This happens on both Series X AND Xbox Cloud Gaming.
This in itself is already bad enough but it also locks your character in place. After a reboot/reset of the console and you try to load back in, the game will crash upon loading the zone. This essentially means that your character is entirely stuck and you can't log in to the character.

Through what I can only describe as luck, I was able to 'crashingly' make my way out of the zone through Xbox Cloud Gaming as it appears to have a lower draw distance. After 5 attempts of crashes I was finally out. Seems this is connected to some sort of object on the Series consoles/Enhanced edition of the game causes the game to just outright crash.

In summary this means:
- You can't complete the 'A Tale of Two Mothers' quest.
- You can't complete the Summerset zone 100%.
- You require sheer luck to not completely lock your character and be unable to load that character in it's entirety.
- This is not specific to my console, this exact same issue happens on Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Surely this should be a priority #1 bug to fix?! This is locking characters into place and must be causing GM's and Support headaches to ferry characters out of a broken/locked state?

Feranth

While endangering my progress and my character, I wend ahead and tested the theory regarding the game crashing because it has issues rendering a certain 'object' in the zone. It seems I was correct as I could 'trigger' the crash by looking directly to the right of the door once you enter the Shimmerene Waterworks.

So what I did was do the whole quest and zone by staring at the ceiling. Yes. Really. It was a surreal experience. Although I had to talk to some NPC's and open some doors, thankfully the 'object' that is causing the crash and system lock-up is not in your direct sight when you do so.

This way I was able to finish the quest and the zone. I was also consistently able to avoid the crash in the load screen by frantically pushing my right analog stick down so I looked up at the ceiling during the last second of the load screen.

I'll copy this reply to the Reddit/Twitter posts as well. Still would appreciate this be fixed....it's weird doing a quest like this...

ZOS_Bill

We are actively investigating the crashing issues players have run into since the last update. An update has been posted here. With multiple threads discussing these crash issues we've decided to close this thread. You can continue discussion in the thread linked below.

Constant crashes on console since enhanced update