Heya all. Wasn't sure where to post this, so I figured I'd do it here.

Firstly, thanks to Ubisoft for the Yuletide Festival. It's nice to have events like this. Kind of wish I had a few more side quests to do for tokens instead of spamming the archery contest, but such is life.

Speaking of side quests, though... the "Case of the Missing Ale" side quest is completely broken for me. After the update, I didn't even have a marker for it on the map. If not for YouTube and my quest tab, I would have assumed that all I had available to do were the three mini-games and the "Cow Catcher" quest.

So, I figured it was a marker glitch and I would just need to walk to the brewery to trigger the quest. I wandered on over, walked into the brewery, and all I got was Eivor noting that the place was trashed. No Alwin to talk to progress the quest and kick in the next phase with Ake. Just an empty, ruined brewery.

After a while, I figured that the npc must have just spawned somewhere stupid in the village and I'd need to track him down to progress. It happens. After five minutes of wandering around Ravensthorpe checking every home and shack, I finally found Alwin... dead and flopped on the ground behind the barracks. So, yeah... he's dead. Hope he doesn't factor into any later story missions or cut-scenes, because if so I'm screwed with 100 hours into the game.

Is there any fix for this? Since this game only allows 20 manual saves and I've been rewriting one every 20 minutes, I have no way to experiment and go back to figure out at what point in the game Alwin died. Heck, I don't even know how he could die considering he's a Ravensthorpe NPC and these kids seem nigh immortal. Just odd as heck.

Best regards,
-Ingel

Also, as an addendum:

I did just try taking my longboat to the correct bandit camp to see if the missing ale cask would be there. Sure enough, it has spawned in the game world and it is sitting right there, all shiny and pristine, in the main building.

However, I can't interact with it at all. Which, frankly, makes sense. I'm sure the quest chain is:

• Go to brewery. Trigger conversation script "what happened here?"
• Speak to Alwin to advance to the next phase and spawn Ake
• Speak to Ake to advance to the next phase and enable the cask to be interactable
• Interact with cask, carry it to designated spot, and set it on the ground to complete the objective

But since Alwin is dead for some reason, I can't complete this and I'll have to grind out the archery minigame another four times. I'm also, as mentioned before, probably screwed if I need to talk to Alwin for some reason to advance a main story quest later on. I hope I don't.

@ingel_riday I'm having the exact same issues. I can't even find Alwin though, but im guessing that he's laying dead somewhere. Ive seen a couple of posts about this glitch, have you got anywhere with it yet?