While in the underdark, talking to Derryth Bonecloak about her husband with NPC Laezel, then clicked on her bovine familiar, Deep Rothe; got some tiny word balloons, clicked out of it. Afterwards, noticed that another NPC (Shadowheart) still had one of those tiny word balloons opened, but then disappeared after a short while.

Pressed esc to manually save, noticed that that option was greyed out. Resting for full day in camp did nothing to restore the save option.

Finally, loaded game to a previous save, skipped trying to speak to the cow, spoke with Derryth Bonecloak as before without any issues. Saved the game and continued on.

I understand that this has been a prevailing problem after searching on line. So my advice is, save often, and if it happens to you, restore by loading previous save and bypassing the conversation triggered it.

the little balloon thing is a script marker that says a vid should be playing i.e, you broke the game by swapping characters at that point and yes the game is riddled with these types of script errors because its still in beta

you can't save your game during combat or during vids [by design] & in this case you are still in vid because the code never sent the stop flag to the engine... in other words its not the conversation triggered it but what you did during that conversation.

Is that really what the speech balloons mean? It seems a lot like D:OS, where you can split up your party, have one character in conversation (with speech bubbles), and the others go around doing whatever the hell they please.

In D:OS, this was an effective way to lock an NPC's line of sight, so you could rob them blind. I assumed that's the same thing here.

Nonetheless, when I end up in that state, I've been able to switch characters back to the one in convo, hit <space> to continue the dialogue, and it all ends up okay. Don't usually have to save/reload.

some vids don't have any talking... eg, the first time you step on deck in the tutorial and see the dragon fly overhead [fall down] this vid assumes you have your character selected not the gith

yes pressing space bar in any vid with talking should workaround script errors blocking the talk but the bug is still there and caused by lack of testing... hence the beta tag