Well I ran into an unexpected problem. I can't enter Death Valley. My game crashes and exits every time I try to go there. This game has been weird from the start, with the hunter and wolf quest bugged, the werewolf that bit the guy in Darion didn't drop the blood. Now this. From looking at the savedata.txt files, it seems that Karador's Castle, his face file and a whole lot more, about 200 pages, isn't there. Every save file seems to be a different length, so I can't just do a simple copy and paste even if I can find which data is missing. Those files are so unintelligible, I'm not sure I'll be able to copy and paste from a different playthrough to make it appear, and I don't even know what all is actually missing from Death Valley that's breaking the game.
I'll search the tech forum here, but my guess is that this game of mine is over--the save files are so complex that I don't know how I'll be able to sift through it all.
Super disappointed.
Edit: It appears others have had problems with areas not ever loading in different places, but no one as yet (page 8 of tech forums) found a solution. Ugh.