Right so you know how this game doesn't have fast travel outside of the carts that link major destinations and you gotta walk everywhere, well, that's kinda how you encounter these things. You do always have a bunch of ongoing quests, but on the way there you just run into shit, all the time! It's the whole journey before destination concept executed beautifully.
The quest usually is a typical rpg fare of find the lost child or protect this village from lizardmen, so on and so forth, but on the way there you encounter stuff and the key detail is letting those encounters kinda take you by hand and divert your path a bit, letting the thrill of discovery take control and not just doing the quest you're actually on and nothing else.
Basically the world feels really alive so you end up immersed way more than you should be on paper, tons of small details like the time of day play a huge role.
Like one time on the way back from a quest I saw a Griffin randomly attacking and eating these poor oxes that pull the carts, I didn't know what was happening but hearing random roaring lead me to the scene, turns out there's like a farm out there by the outskirts of the capital where they graze em when off duty, so I tried to fight off the Griffin to protect em, I'm too low level to manage to kill since it tries to fly off if you take too long or injure it too much, but I drove it off after getting its life to the last bar...and I was just happy to have protected the oxes that take me places, there was no quest, no reward outside of a few Griffin feathers I managed to beat out of it (which are decently valuable actually but nowhere near what I'd have gotten if I killed it outright) but I still had a huge sense of satisfaction that it didn't manage to kill any of the oxes on my watch.
