openmw.org

I'm using openmw and morrowind rebirth and when I kill the rats for the first fighter's guild quest and then talk to the lady, she doesn't recognize that I've killed the rats.

Did you dispose of the rat corpses? If so, then you may have fallen victim to Bug #3528: Disposing of corpses breaks quests.

Thank you Thunderforge. I always read that you should dispose of corpes because not disposing them clutters up the game or something. I will reload from before and try again. I'll report back

You were right!! I'm glad I know that now. Should I keep on not disposing corpses? Or are there ones I want to dispose of and ones I don't want to dispose? I feel all i knew before was a lie
Do you think glitches like these are something openmw will fix or is there some openmw friendly mod that fixes stuff like that?

I know, it makes you feel like everything you know is a lie

In vanilla Morrowind, disposing of corpses was usually recommended for performance and load time reasons. I'm not sure how effective it was, but it was a pretty common belief. There's more evidence though that not disposing of corpses on the Xbox version contributed to save games growing to ridiculous sizes, so it was a recommended behavior.

OpenMW is built on a completely new engine and, to my knowledge, there are no identified issues with not disposing of corpses. There is the open bug I mentioned with disposing of corpses during the death animation, but it should be clear that this is a bug that people are working on fixing.

For now, it's probably safest to either not dispose of corpses, or take extra precautions to make sure the death animation is complete before disposing. But once that bug is fixed, then it is completely up to you whether you want to dispose the corpses. Do you want to leave a testament to your mighty victory? Or do you want to go the extra mile to destroy every cliff racer that has ever crossed your path?

One additional thing with disposing of corpses is, doing so effectively removes the creature/NPC from the game state, which is what improves stability/performance in the vanilla engine (it reduces the amount of tracked data). It basically resets the object so that when the area is loaded again, it'll respawn regardless of how long it's been since the engine doesn't remember them being dead (except for persistent things like named NPCs and quest-specific creatures and such; disposing of them doesn't actually save much since the engine can't reset them and will remember them for the whole game).