Hi all! I’m not seeing this bug reported anywhere so far and seems like a niche situation so I’m throwing in my first report! It’s a weird one and I haven’t reported bugs before so forgive the length!
The issue:
I am playing multiplayer with a friend, and we discovered that suddenly 10 hours in I cannot speak to any NPCs or companions, whether it be at camp or out in the world. The speech bubble appears on mouseover but clicking characters, nothing happens. This affects ONLY the two characters I control. After back-stepping in saves, I believe we found what caused the issue, but I’ll outline the steps leading up to it for bug recreation etc.
We believe it was caused by non-lethally finishing off the leader of the goblins by the windmill.We initially chatted with them, paid the 1 gold toll so they would be non-hostile while we explored. Then we wanted to save the gnome so we positioned ourselves strategically and attacked them to get into combat. About halfway through the combat, my main character accidentally non-lethally KOed the leader (started with an F) instead of killing him outright because I forgot to toggle off that option from a previous fight.
Things we noticed that were odd – as soon as he was knocked out, the rest of the goblins ran away and I think there was a ‘Surrendered’ notice that popped up, but it was awhile ago so I don’t remember exactly what that looked like. However, the hunter’s mark one of the archers had put on my main character didn’t go away (we thought maybe it was because that goblin wasn’t dead to deactivate it), and then when I tried to ‘speak’ to the knocked out goblin, I did not get the little mini-dialogue scene that lets you ‘Search them for valuables’ or ‘Leave’ like we had with other previous non-lethally finished enemies.
We didn’t think anything of it, assuming he just didn’t have anything, so we killed him because we’d meant to do that anyway, and then proceeded to continue our exploration, sneaking up and killing the goblins on the roof of the Blighted Village and going down underground and going through the entire phase spider Matriarch fight before finally long-resting and that’s when we noticed that my friend could talk to all our companions, but I couldn’t. All that would happen is the little speech bubble would come up when hovering over anyone and do the animation when I clicked, but they wouldn’t respond or it wouldn’t go into a cutscene.
Back-stepping, we found that I still had this issue if we loaded a save from before camping and before the spider fight.
Things we tried to kickstart my character being able to do dialogue again, but none of them worked:- Saving & reloading
- Closing the game completely & reloading
- Having ME click the long rest button to see if it would give the focus in the cambion cutscene at camp over to me (the first time it had been my friend’s MC that got that cutscene, me hitting camp didn’t make a difference, he got it again)
- Talking to characters/NPCs as Wyll, who was the companion I had been controlling this whole time (no one responded or would have a cutscene, just like my MC)
- Swapping characters between my friend and my control: we DID find out that I was able to talk to people as HIS MC but not my own so it looks like the dialogue bug was affected specifically the characters I controlled at the time: my MC and Wyll
We ended up having to reload saves until we got to one that was before the goblin windmill fight and I was able to start a convo with Wyll again with my MC.That’s why we believe it was the odd non-lethal KO on the goblin leader that triggered this, maybe it still thinks the characters I controlled at the time are in combat still and can’t talk or some other state. The only NPC that will at all react to me clicking them is Astarion controlled by my friend, as he just says the typical ‘Not right now’ dialogue that happens when trying to talk to the companion controlled by the other player.
I hope this info is helpful and that it can be fixed!
The only other explanation we came up with for this bug is that I accidentally YEETED the gnome on the windmill after the fight because I clicked the wrong lever before reading the labels and this is Karma. WHOOPSIE-DAISIE.
