So I just finished "Diplomatic Immunity" and went back to Delphine, we discussed how the Thalmor have been searching for Esbern and how he may have crucial knowledge regarding the return of the dragons to Skyrim. At the end, Delphine mentioned something to me about Esbern's location being possibly in Riften and that Brynjolf would have more information about his whereabouts.

Yet nothing appeared in my journal, no text on the screen about "A Cornered Rat" quest being accepted, and now Delphine doesn't want to talk about Esbern anymore.

What I have tried doing is some console commands to add the quest,

player.setstage MQ202 10player.startquest MQ202

and it will not appear. I fear I may have to restart the entire game which is extremely unfortunate as I had sunk 20 hours now into it and completed many other challenging quest lines and have grown attached to my character.

Any advice on how to proceed?

PMUB

If anyone has a working way to add quests to the journal that would be splendid too!

i have the exact same problem :/

Bump for great justice,

also i have this problem as well

yeah this is really annoying, i found esbern and he just always tells me to leave him alone (his voice seems to work and all so i probably dont have that other bug ppl are having). I just cant get the actual quest tho that might make it possible for me to talk to him :/
i already did a few quests in the thieves guild but i don't have the option to ask any of them about an old man hiding or smth to get the quest :/

i actually already went to riften and did a few quests there before i did the thanes embassy quest. I also already explored the rat way and killed all the hostiles there (not the thieves guild guys) back then, so maybe thats what triggered the bug? :F
or maybe the bug was triggered cause i talked to brynjolf before i finished the last main story quest.

anyway, im stuck and need help ;/

Solution: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1259862-major-bug-esbern/page__p__19217008

thats a different bug Annon, they already have the quest in their quest list... we don't. So we are stuck before that already. We are missing the dialogue that triggers the "a cornered rat" quest.

I watched a playthough on youtube and the dialog was the exact same as what they said in the video. It just never showed up in the journal, replaying this on a different character so I can see if that was a bug on the one character or in my game.

weird, i didn't even get the dialog option to ask brynjolf or the barkeeper about some old guy living in the rat way :/

I mean when I turned Diplomatic Immunities in she mentioned Brynjolf had info on Esbern but I can't ask Brynjolf anything of the sort.

On a tangent, is there anywhere I can edit perhaps that would contain what quests I have already done?

I have 41 hours and 32 minutes of gameplay, and I'm stuck here. No quest given.

If I have to redo this because Bethesda can't patch it, I think I may kill myself. /sarcasm

buuuuuuuuuump

You go to Riften – talk to Brynjolf (he tells you of Esbern living in the Ratway – if he is at his stand) – it helps doing Brynjolf a favour (the ring thinggy – DO THAT).
I had some problems as well here – getting the location of Esbern, but it is logical.

After that (so you have helped Brynjolf DURING DAYTIME (not night-time) – the game tells you that, but you can miss it):
Meet Brynjolf again in the Ratway (they are running the bar down there) and talk to him again. Make sure he is there – if he is not there – wait till he shows up, in his nice thieves guild outfit.
He will tell you again – about the “old guy living in the sewers, paying good money for not mentioning him”.
THEN (!) go to Esbern.

So it works. Make sure before talking to Esbern that all hostile Elves are killed in the cell.
If the door does not open (it can take very long – that is the joke – so bring with you 2 minutes) – take an earlier save-game. It is very rare, that the engine skips something, but it can happen. But a cell-reload is always your friend. If something is not working - FIRST - do that. Trust me on that.
This part works... it is a lil hard to understand but it works. We have the same game.

TC
Ryan

don't act like we are stupid, i have finished nearly every thieves guild quest by now and i never had the option to ask brynjolf or anyone in the thieves guild about esbern and i have been trying constantly

i actually kinda feel like bethesda was trying to make fun of people when they added a console command to start ALL quests in the game at once ( "StartAllQuests" or "saq" ) and not added one that starts a single quest ....

bump dammit :< whens my tes contruction set released to i can fix this :<

"Sometimes this quest will fail to start at all and never even show up in your quest log after completing Diplomatic Immunity, in which case you will have to skip ahead to the next quest, Alduin's Wall. In the dev console, type setstage mq203 5."

just to give an update, this actually worked for me, it skipped 1 or 2 quests. I'm suddenly at alduins wall with esbern and deph..whatever her name and could continue the main story for now. Didn't have much interaction with esbern after this tho so i dunno if there are any consequences down the road.

This is a bit of a generalization, but I noticed that it is *VERY EASY* to screw quests / rewards up by clicking to skip dialog, walking away or closing out chat.

I've run into it a few times where quest dialog got stuck because I skipped the script that way, npcs become unresponsive, etc.

Another example of this is the orc towns, you can easily glitch the quest and they DO respond and tell you what they want but nothing appears in the journal or tells you where to go. fortunately with that one you have a few camps to choose from to get the same quest.

But with cornered rat and a handful of others, the nature of the script makes it unprogressable. Please fix asap!