How do you know what is Critical Path vs side content?

[Falkon Swiftblade]

I've watched random bits of some streams yesterday and I was wondering how do we know which quests are going to keep us on the critical path, versus random quests that are filler? 

[Leferd]

The journal.

[CocoonMaN]

Did somebody say journal???

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxs3g0Xgh7k

[Nonek]

Hopefully we'll be surprised by what twists and turns the main narrative takes, I always like when a game throws me into deep waters when I am just going through the motions. For everything to be labelled and explained beforehand smacks a little too much of MMO's for me personally.

[Himntor]

It's likely the main questline will be more involved in asking questions about your main character, rather than other characters. It should be pretty obvious once we have our hands on the game.

[huang]

PoE would be the first game I know, where this isn't obvious.

[salo]

Most likely your character will have an agenda (the purpose of the game), like finding the water chip in Fallout 1. If you are doing stuff in the game that furthers this, then you are on the crit path. If you do stuff like help an old lady set mouse traps because she asked you in the street, then you are doing side quests.

[Voss]

From the prologue Obsidian has already shown off  something <redacted>  at the end, and then Chapter 1 starts.  <redacted> will be the main plot of the game.  Given what they showed off ages ago, some vague exchanges during the PAX stream, and a couple central points of the lore and recent history, I sincerely hope it isn't what I suspect.  

 

I'll find out in 2 days, I guess...

[DarkWanderer]

If you'll read everything carefully it should be quite obvious - game is starting with

undefined yet supernatural phenomenon that affects our player

and we'll have to follow the leads. For example first step will be " X NPC can have some answeres - investigate" then he will point us to another diresction and so on. Besides - i'm quite sure that journal will have it separated from other quests.

[DruidX]

if you are not sure you can also always look it up in the wikis:

 

Gamepedia

 

Orcz

[Falkon Swiftblade]

I'm asking if the main quests will be dictated main quest or something rather than quests that say travel to X place, or some long title or phrase that if you put the game down for a week and come back to it if you'll even remember what you were doing. I've been noticing a lot of fancy pants names of characters and areas, and I feel like it might be confusing which is the path to follow to do the content, besides just following the main road. That's basically how I assumed you would know, if you are in an area and there's quests to do and it doesn't involve following the main road then I'm probably safe.

[Cantousent]

I'd really rather have the journal look more like a journal. Maybe have a section where there's a list of things that the PC needs to do, like you can have in a real journal, but more or less things are described as an unfolding narrative. Like some of the others here, I don't want to see a journal that screams "computer game device to keep track of things needed to finish the game!"

[soedenone]

I'd really rather have the journal look more like a journal. Maybe have a section where there's a list of things that the PC needs to do, like you can have in a real journal, but more or less things are described as an unfolding narrative. Like some of the others here, I don't want to see a journal that screams "computer game device to keep track of things needed to finish the game!"

Morrowinds (post Tribunal) journal. Best of both worlds. That is something I would also really, really like!

I think a balance has to be struck and that one actually worked just about as well as possible, in my estimation.

 

Oftentimes journals function like checklists nowadays and are, as you say, much too gamey.