nope not changed it looks like dialogue system has broken some how ill give your steps a try and see if i can get the same state
Seems like it might be connected with King - the times I couldn't do Lily's quest, I'd gotten the emberheart from the standing stones to summon King and did King's quest before getting the flowers for Lily. This time I got Lily's emberheart, used that to summon King, did King's quest, and when I reached Pierre and tried to talk to him I got the blank box. I could still talk to King, but only King. I collected the standing stones emberheart, but I couldn't use it on a campfire - I tried the one in the mines first, then the one at the sawmill. Neither worked.
found it. it was king related as he is the only one that has a text entry dialogue option. entering text and talking to someone else cause them to try and fill in data to a non existent variable so dialogue system crashes. fixed now and i also fixed a few other problems with the dialogue system and removed unused code so hopefully something like this wont happen again.