Day 3 Meeting Place Help!!!

[Aporpheus]

So I've talked with both Rubin and Grief and asked them to come to our usual place before the town hall bells rang.

I waited until midnight and there was no update for the quest, no new thoughts, no new markers on the map, just nothing. I have a thought bubble that says that I should come to the station at midnight but there's nobody there.
I've decided to wait several hours more to see if it fails, but nothing happens

I am genuinely confused if I somehow messed up or if a random bug just screwed my playthrough.

Here's what my MindMap looks like https://imgur.com/jsjzgJt

[kalevatar]

You didn't talk with Lara? But maybe it's possible to trigger the meeting with only two of them.
But still, where were you waiting exactly? The meeting isn't at the passenger train station but more south into the Steppe, near Murky's wagon. You should be able to see the bonfire.

[Aporpheus]

Originally posted by kalevatar:

You didn't talk with Lara? But maybe it's possible to trigger the meeting with only two of them.
But still, where were you waiting exactly? The meeting isn't at the passenger train station but more south into the Steppe, near Murky's wagon. You should be able to see the bonfire.

I talked with her in the beginning.
Am I supposed to talk with her after I convinced the other two? If that's the case then I'll have to replay to whole day basically, there's not much time left after I talk to Rubin before the bell triggers. I wish the tips in your thoughts would be a little more specific.

[Melleschwein]

I encountered the exact same problem in my current playthrough, and I think it's a bug - it worked just fine before. Now I just can't get the meeting to take place. Maybe this happened with one of the updates, but I wouldn't know which one.

My mindmap looked exactly the same as in your screenshot. The icons indicate you've done everything there is to do imho.
When this quest was still working (at least for me), you would get the ones with the hands for inviting Grief and Rubin, and once you had invited both, the one with the starry sky would appear, telling you that you've set up the meeting. That one would also give you a map marker as soon as it was actually time for the meeting, so it would pop up around midnight and you would know where exactly to find them.
Going to the meeting and talking to your friends would then give you the big one to the far left that's still missing on your screenshot, completing the quest.
If you didn't manage to invite both before the alarm bell thing however, you would get the yellow symbol to the far right instead ("now is not the time to get sentimental with friends", or whatever it says...), indicating that the whole thing got cancelled.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the starry sky quest node and the yellow one contradict each other and shouldn't be on the mindmap at the same time. One means you set up the meeting in time, while the other means you didn't, and is sort of a failstate.

What happens now the way I see it is that you always get the yellow "meeting cancelled" thingie as soon as the alarm bell goes off, no matter what.

I also tried talking to Lara after talking to the other two, thinking that maybe they rewrote or added some dialogue, but she didn't have anything to say. So yeah, I think it's just bugged now. :(

[Aporpheus]

Originally posted by Melleschwein:

I encountered the exact same problem in my current playthrough, and I think it's a bug - it worked just fine before. Now I just can't get the meeting to take place. Maybe this happened with one of the updates, but I wouldn't know which one.

Yeah I also felt it was really weird that I got the yellow marker even though it says that the meeting WILL take place now. Oh well I guess if its a bug I'll have to see how this quest resolves in a new playthrough (still not sure how I feel about the RNG being predetermined at the start) There's plenty to do though, so I figured pretty early on the game only gets better when you replay it.

Thanks for the testing that you did! I'm sure that many players who are encountering this issue won't get lost like I did when they find this discussion post.

[kalevatar]

That sure looks like a bug, because I'm positive that you can invite Lara for the meeting too. The whole point of it is to reunite all your old friends, her included.

[Melleschwein]

Well, you can still invite Lara, just like before. The initial conversation with her is what triggers the idea of meeting up with everyone, so you can only talk to Rubin and Grief once you've talked to Lara and suggested the meeting to her. You can't talk to her a second time after inviting the other two though, so that's what I meant. But it's always been like that as far as I remember. Like I wrote earlier, everything with the dialogues and such seems to not have changed, the only thing that's different is the automatic failstate you get with the alarm bells, like they accidentally removed the conditon for the quest getting cancelled or something.

Luckily it doesn't seem to have any real repercussions - I was a bit worried about the situation with Rubin later on, because I remember people speculating that talking to him at the meeting might be one of numerous things influencing the outcome of his whole ordeal later in the game. It didn't though. Still, I think it's a bit sucky to miss out on the conversations with your friends if it's a first time playthrough!

[Player]

Did anyone figure out what causes the bug?
Is there a chance of fixing it if you reload a save that's right before you start the quest or something?