Lets not get into that game's bugs and glitches, theres a myriad of them.

And the quest isn't screwed. It's a Quest Log scripting issue. The quest isn't failed. Any rewards XP or item or NPC related don't go away no matter what.

Yikes, I'm surprised I didn't get one. I must of been quite lucky.

Interesting, there is an unofficial community patch mod that fixes quite literally hundreds of bugs in the game including broken quests and quest item related issues.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/19/?

Here's a list of the multitude of bugs it addresses (although it'd take a week to read it all):

http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/Unofficial%20Skyrim%20Patch%20Version%20History.html

If you've never encountered any quest related bugs then either you're playing a different game than everyone else, or you must have followed a walkthrough that carefully avoids them perhaps. :) Or alternatively you never did the particular quests that have bugs or didn't do them in a way that those bugs happened to trigger. Either way, you're extremely lucky if you played the entire game and never encountered a single quest bug. I encountered dozens of them using stock Skyrim fully updated including many listed as fixed in this community patch. I never installed the community patch but if/when I ever play Skyrim again it'll be the first thing I install as it got tiring having to hit up google and head to one of the several Skyrim wikis out there for a quest related issue to look in the "Bugs" section of the web page and find my issue along with hopefully suggested hacks or workarounds to get past it.

Google for "Skyrim quest bug" and you'll be there for about 200 years reading the search results. Seriously. :)

I think between the two copies (xbox and pc) was around 100 hrs each. So I must of got REAL lucky lol.

*** Skyrim SPOILER WARNING ***

I'd have absolutely loved to play the game right through without any breaking bugs. It totally destroys immersion completely. The worst one of all really upset me and I almost stopped playing the game. It was during the mage's college quest line when the eye of magnus is there and you leave for other quests and you return there to find out Arcanus or whatever the stuck up elven mage jerk's name is - has taken over the eye and blocked the others out of the room with powerful magic.

In the fight that ensued, the archmage Sven Aron or whatever the heck his name is - gets killed however:

1) He died fighting the dragon near the main academy building and his body fell INSIDE THE BUILDING WALLS.

2) I had an open main-quest blocker requiring me to speak to him or reach his dead body or something but it was simply unreachable because he was literally inside the wall.

This was main quest line and so the game could not proceed no matter what. Sadly, I did not realize the scope of the bug at the time so I ignored it and kept playing until all other main quests were completed and I could no longer progress the main story no matter what. I googled around and found out that this was a quest breaking bug in the game, and that there were several similar breakages that could occur there and which were kind of random whether they'd happen to a particular person or not depending on how that fight played out. I suspect the glitch was like many glitches in the game - due to the game's poor collision detection. You can literally walk through walls in the game by picking up any item that is concave such as a bowl or plate or similar, holding it out in front of you and running high speed into the wall or a mountain or whatever several times at different angles and within a few attempts you will literally run through the wall/fence/mountain/etc. Well that bug also affects some NPCs at times causing them to warp inside mountains/walls etc.

When I discovered the solution eventually, it required me to reload a save game from BEFORE the bug triggered and try it again a few times to hopefully get different results, so I lost over a week's worth of die-hard gaming hours and had to redo shit tonnes of my game, I was not impressed. Only some time after that did I discover a secondary solution which was to go in the console and type some commands of the nature "setquest <questname> <a number>", getting the questname and number from a 3rd party website. Basically it forces the game engine to mark a quest as being completed or reset it to any particular point throughout the quest. Another option was a command to bring the guy back to life but I didn't try that.

There was another quest where I was supposed to kill some bandit leader and when I got there he was already dead because I had killed him before. That quest would not progress either. Again, brother Google found a solution of bringing that guy back to life and he respawned in mid air outside about 40 feet in the air, fell to his death and the game registered that he died. :)

I could literally go on and on, it was getting crazy. Some days I'd need to find anywhere as many as 5 hacks like this to work around game bugs. Even after finishing the game there were a half dozen open quests still hanging in my quest log that the game never registered as me having completed them even though I did.

Needless to say I was rather forgiving as the game was amazing, but other gamers aren't so kind to Bethesda and consider their games the buggiest of the buggy. :) With the sheer number of bugs I encountered in the game of all different sorts, I'm really surprised to hear anyone play the game through and never encounter one, it's just bizarre. :)

If you never did though, go on youtube and look for skyrim bug videos, some of them are hilarious. Be sure to look for Witcher 3 bug videos too, some of the bugs in Witcher 3 are hilarious as well. :)

I have played Skyrim and I totally agree with you. Bethesda has a bad reputation for putting out great games that are usually buggy as hell, and SO SLOW to fix their bugs. CDPR has impressed me with their 0-day bugs in the past so I was surprised with TW3 and the number of bugs I encountered.

I hopped into my Skyrim after-game for a while today and went to Jorvaskr to get some companion quests. Somehow, for some unknown reason, all of a sudden Farkas now draws his sword immediately when I'm in the vicinity and starts talking to be about nonsense, then puts his sword away waiting for me to choose something. If I hit ESC to end the dialogue and then start to walk away, he draws his sword and chases me, engages in conversation and puts his sword away again and does this in a loop over and over and over again. I can't get away from him.

Yet Another Skyrim Game Breaking Bug(TM)

I googled it like usual and of course all of the Skyrim wikis speak of this and a few very similar bugs with Farkas and state the same bug can happen with his brother Vilnus or whatever his name is too. Some people claim if you cast Unrelenting Force fully powered to level 3 shout on him he dies and then the problem goes away, however he doesn't actually die, he is just unconscious for a minute then gets up and chases you and does it again.

I searched the web for a half hour, watched youtube videos etc. and absolutely nobody has a solution for this bug. There are people claiming to have solutions but absolutely none of them work, and most people's claimed alleged solutions are just "maybe this will work" rather than something they know to be an actual working solution.

Annoying.

In the end, the only thing I could do was try to get away from him and make some distance as eventually there is enough distance that he leaves you alone until you get near him again. Only problem was that I stupidly chose the dialogue choice with him once to take on another quest and he decided he would partner with me on a quest to kill a dragon - and do this endlessly looped auto-dialogue nag on me every 5 seconds the whole time. <sigh>

I ended up fast travelling to the dragon, and he comes along on the fast travel. I had to use the unrelenting force shout to knock the shit out of him while I fired arrows at the dragon. Had to do that 3 or 4 times until the dragon finally died, then hit him one more time with the shout, get on my horse and run away at high speed. Looking behind me he was chasing me on foot with his sword drawn again. Tried to fast-travel but it wouldn't let me - saying that I was being pursued by guards.

So basically, the game somehow fucks up and mistakenly treats him as if he is a guard and you broke the law, so that's why he draws his sword. People have concluded that you must have a bounty on you in one of the 9 holds and the only way to make Farkas or his brother break the loop is to pay the fine, however the dialogue option doesn't show up for him. I was certain I didn't have a bounty on me but I went back to every single hold and no guards anywhere want to capture me for crime. I even went ahead and committed crimes in each major city then paid the fine after, but Farkas doesn't give a crap he still chases me with his endlessly looped dialogue crap. Yay.

Problem happens for shitloads of people it turns out and the only known guaranteed fix if none of the other suggestions work is to reload a savegame from before the problem happened. I've no idea when that was but it'd be at least 50-100 hours back so um.. no thanks. There are no console commands or other hacks known that can fix this bug, the only thing to do is to avoid going near Farkas, which means avoid going near the companions completely and no longer doing their quests.

In the end I got him off my back by completing that dragon quest in which case he stops being a "follower" and goes back to Jorvaskr - but - if I go back there too, then he starts doing all that again and wont leave me alone. Annoying as fuck.



Second quest bug of the day: I decided to start the war which I hadn't sided on before. It was one of 3 quests I did not do. So I reluctantly decided to join the stormcloaks, did the first "prove yourself" quest, then I'm given an assignment to go attack Whiterun. I completed the battle for Whiterun and then I'm sent on another quest near Falkreath. I meet up in the camp there and am told to go meet someone else near Fort Neugrad. I do that and shortly after I encounter 2 bugs.

1) I'm supposed to sneak into the fort at night. I tried that numerous times and am detected and the mission fails before I even get close to the place. After trying several times I lost my patience and googled and found a youtube video of someone playing that quest that did not have a bug, so I know exactly what you're supposed to do. I watched 2 different people play it bug-free in fact. I go back in my game and do what they did - no dice, game bug prevents me from sneaking in for who knows why. I search the web and find that some people encounter this bug randomly and others don't, not known why. So basically I can't stealth sneak into this mission, I have to fail the sneak and go in with brute force and hope for the best. Might not be a game breaker, but definitely is a optional subquest breaking bug.

2) Due to #1 I had to reload to try again, and my save game was just after fast travel to the stormcloak camp but before I talked to anyone. So reloading there should give me the same result as when I did it the first time - go talk to the commander, then go on to the quest. Only, I take 5 steps towards his tent and hear "someone is there! <sound of sword being drawn>, then the commander comes out of the tent and attacks me for no reason even though I'm on his side, I have not done anything hostile, don't even have my weapon drawn. He wont stop attacking me at all. I reload and try again a few times, same results. I web search - yup, some people have that happen randomly too, only way around it is to reload an earlier save game. So I go back to my savegame before my fast travel then re fast travel back to the camp and magiclaly he doesn't attack me.

Out of my 650 hours of playing Skyrim I'd say that 200 of them were crap like this. :) Every bug that I encountered in the game, and there were a shit tonne of them - I was not alone. I found dozens of people reporting the same bug in forums/etc. and found them all listed on wikis as "Known game bugs" or similar with exact descriptions to what I experienced.

I'm willing to bet that despite it being advertised as a non-linear game, that it has linearity/continuity errors in the quest logic that if you truly play certain quests in an order that differs from what the code expects then bad things can happen. If you're very exploratory like me and perhaps do a cave before the quest in it gets triggered and stuff like that it can throw the game logic off and -> nastybugs.

I loved the game but don't think I could endure such a bugfest again. If/when I replay it, it'll be with the community mega bugfix patch. :)