Not to mention sometimes there’s no quest markers. You see some npc steal from some other npc. it’s not a cutscene or anything, you just happen to be watching the NPCs do their thing. So you decide to go talk to the thief. You can either let them go, tell on them, fight them, extort them, or extort them and tell on them anyway.

And nobody in this thread has even talked about how much animals know about what’s happening in the world when you talk to them.