It appears I have failed a side quest by finishing a main quest. It would of been nice to of been given a warning before starting the main quest.

Poo!

This game offers a lot of surprises, and this is one of them :) The next time you'll play you won't make this mistake again ;)

There is that many of them it is quite hard keeping track of it. I don't mind a surprise or two but that is not a good thing.

Which side quest did you fail? There are some confirmed bugs that cause this to happen on occasion so it might be attributable to that and not anything you did.

The Cave of Dreams

I finished the entire game with only 5 failed quests. 2 of them were directly related to each other and both failed as the result of one action (I didn't protect the shady merchant's brother at the Pontar crossing, oops), one I completed and the game told me I successfully completed it and marked it completed and later on it magically showed up as failed for some unknown reason, and the other two were a work in progress that got main-quest-progression-fragged as I progressed on the main quest. One was High Stakes, I forget the other one.

Yeah, bums me out a bit that I missed out on High Stakes and I think they could have either made it not do that, or made it much more obvious that would happen if you move forward any more.

Not a huge issue though as I know I will play the game through again in the future, and I most certainly wont make certain mistakes I made the first time through. Ah yes, that was another one that said I failed it which I did not agree with. I did the whole quest and have no idea how or why it failed me.

Cave of Dreams failed for me as well after it was initially labelled as completed. This one is definitely a known bug.

Nice to know im not imagining it. 60hrs and one failed quest. that just annoys me.

Same here. As a completionist with OCD to boot, it drives me crazy seeing a failed quest in my quest log. Still, I suppose it's a minor issue in an otherwise excellent game.

I'm really surprised with the number of blatant quest bugs I've seen in this game. Some of them are totally unavoidable and happen no matter what you do. It seems the developers should have caught these with a simple play through. I really hope these "failed" quests somehow get retro-actively fixed and marked correctly through the next patch.

I also had the same Cave of Dreams failure after Act III started even though I completed it. Another quest that reared its ugly head again upon completion of the game was the Nobleman Statuette. This quest is not listed as failed but has been re-listed as active in the secondary quests section again, even though I completed it way back in Act I.

There are some annoying ones but overall I only experienced a small handful and none of them completely broke my game. I assume you've never played Skyrim? :) My Skyrim playthrough had not only quest bugs regularly but totally game breaking "start the game over again" type bugs which would have completely ruined the game entirely if it wasn't for Google and special game console commands you can throw into the console to reset quests and fix glitches.

Now that I've completed both games, if I were to rate the two games based on quest related glitches with 100% being "most stable" and 0% being "least stable", I'd rate The Witcher 3 at 98% and I'd rate Skyrim at like 70%. Outside of quest breakers/glitches, if I were to rate them on overall stability versus bugginess, I'd rate The Witcher 3 at about 95% stable and polished and Skyrim at about 40% stable and polished.

The Witcher 3 is actually one of the most stable games of this size and scope that I've ever played despite the various bugs/glitches I encountered, and they're only likely to fix many of them over time and make it even better. I'm quite impressed at how stable it actually is.

Having said that, I too do hope that the quest related glitches get fixed in the next patch, in particular the "Sven wont stay dead!" bug, and the "Shortcut" quest bug, as well as the druid that has a "!" over his head and wont ever talk to you bug. :)

I've just noticed that Cave of Dreams is marked as failed for me, too... must be because of what happens during the banquet at Kaer Trolde...

Ah-ha! So “Cave of Dreams” is bugged! I feel a bit better now.

Interesting, I put a good 200 hrs into Skyrim and never came across one bug that screwed up any quest.