Blood on the Ice is broken and I'm stuck on the second playthrough

[RiftenWanderer]

I'm on my third playthrough and just hit Windhelm for the Blood on the Ice quest, and something is completely off. The quest triggered fine when I found the body, but now I'm at the part where you're supposed to follow the suspect and nothing happens. I've talked to everyone the guards told me to, I've been to the graveyard, I've done everything the quest marker says, but the actual confrontation trigger just won't fire.

I checked online and apparently this quest is notorious for breaking? Like, I don't remember having this problem the first time around but maybe I just got lucky. Has anyone figured out a reliable fix without console commands? I'm playing on Switch so that's not even an option for me anyway.

Should I just load an earlier save or is there something I'm missing. It's frustrating because everything else in the game works fine, just this one quest decided to stop cooperating.

 

[DragonbornVet]

Blood on the Ice is definitely one of the buggier quests in the game, yeah. On Switch you're pretty locked out of fixes though - that quest has a few known issues where the suspect confrontation just won't trigger, usually tied to dialogue flags not setting right or NPCs being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Since you can't use console commands, honestly your best bet is probably reloading to before you started it. I know that sucks on a third playthrough, but the quest is finicky enough that it might not resolve itself. Some people have had luck by waiting a full day or two in-game after talking to everyone, but that's hit or miss. The other thing to try - make sure you've actually talked to the suspect yourself after the guards point you toward them. If you just talked to everyone else and skipped them, the flag might not have set.

If reloading feels too painful, you could always just skip it and move on. Blood on the Ice isn't tied to anything major, and you won't lock yourself out of other content by ignoring it. Windhelm's got other stuff to do.