So I've been returning to playing FO2 for the last few weeks, absolutely loving it, and I've advanced through the storyline as far as having gotten the GECK out of Vault 13 from Gruthar. I've picked up quite a few side missions along the way, so that I'm currently at mid-January of 2243. I've gotten Cassidy and Marcus to follow me (unsurprisingly, I had to scraqe Sulik off the walls while we were clearing out the raider den), when suddenly, out of the blue, a debilitating glitch strikes.

After clearing out the raider caves, and receiving my reward from Lynette, but not the quest to deliver the holodisk to Westin, I decided to head off to Reno to search for Bishop's holodisk in order to trigger the aforementioned quest. I parked my car on 2nd Street, and headed into the Shark Club with Marcus and Cassidy. I slept with Angela Bishop to avoid Bishop having my head for coming up to him again before finishing my job (I'd taken the kill Westin quest, and gone up there once already (to have it off with Bishop's wife)), and headed into Bishop's room to try and defuse the bomb on his safe. Of course, since my Traps skill is laughable (16% to be exact), I failed - the message changed from "you fail to find a trap" to "you fail to set off the trap" but little else happened - and I went back down, narrowly avoiding a confrontation with Mr. Bishop on the way down, only to find that both my followers were gone.

I went back outside, and failing to find either one in or near the Shark Club (Cassidy looks exactly like half of Bishop's henchmen, so I may have missed him, but Marcus ... stands out), I hightailed it to Broken Hills to see if my followers had returned to their original positions. Marcus was still nowhere to be found, and Cassidy wasn't at the Spitoon either. My question would be this: is this a known bug, or is my installation corrupted somehow? I'm running the Fallout Collection vanilla, with no patches on top of that, so let's assume I'm running an unpatched game. Will the issue be fixed with patches, and if so, will I have to start a new game for the fix to take effect?