zerebrush: "Roaming" the different areas have the risk of doing some contracts whithout even knowing, right.
But: most if not all of these contracts can be "fullfilled" even if you first kill/gather the target of the contract.
After you "untimely" solved one of these, the game asks you to either visit the notice board at XY, or get your reward from NPC YX.
And, as far as these letters go - the important ones will be in the quest items part of your inventory.
All the others can/should be read and then discarded immediately after reading.
So, if you pick up one or more notes, letters, whatever - go to you inventory, hit "F" (on PC) to sort the inventory.
This way everything new will be right up front in you list of things, yellow marker included.
Hard to find? Guess not.
About "automatic reading" - why have those notes and letters/books at all, when not for reading and thus making the game more interesting? Simply make no sense at all.
skeletonbow: Yeah, I've noticed that I've killed some creature or whatever first and then later found there was a contract on it and got my reward. The way it plays out in-game is a little awkward usually but you're at least credited for completing a contract so all is good.
What I find annoying is that a book/letter/note that unlocks a quest can either automatically go into the "quests" tab of the inventory when you pick it up, requiring you to go read it in there, or it can appear in your regular inventory tab alongside potions requiring you to read it there. There is no consistency between this and no pattern that I can discern that says why a given book or note would go into the regular inventory or the quest tab. It's completely random it seems even if there is a deep down technical reason - it isn't apparent to someone playing the game, at least not me. So when I get any kind of "read the note/book/whatever" instruction on a quest, I have to go to both tabs of the inventory to find the book/note it is referring to and it may or may not have an asterisk on it to indicate it's new when I actually go looking for it, as I might have been in the inventory previously and the mouse strayed over the icon for the given item without me clicking on it.
Every now and then I go into the inventory and right click on every single book/note/letter so that if I missed actually reading/activating one of them but happened to pass the mouse over it causing the game to flag it as having been seen, I will now actually activate any quests or information they contain.
For a long time I did not sell or drop any books or notes though as it wasn't clear if they were still useful or not. In addition to that, the game flags some items that are needed for quests as being unable to be dropped or sold because they're needed for a quest, and other items that are quest items can be easily dropped or sold that should NOT be allowed to be dropped or sold. One example is the statuette bought at a merchant in Novigrad which you're supposed to take to Triss, as well as a handful of other items bought at the same merchant. I never know whether the game is allowing me to sell or drop something that I am actually going to need again later due to a bug or some other reason, so I've hoarded everything. That makes navigating to potions a real irritating experience having to scroll past 150 books/notes to get to "Swallow" or "Thunderbolt" etc.
At any rate, in the case of the quest I'm having a problem with right now, I picked up the note, did not read it right away (nor should I have to), then I swam in the lake and dove down and raided a chest or something and got the quest item or whatever it was, then at some point after that I read the note. But the game never recognized that I read the note. I know I read the right note because I read every single thing in my inventory one at a time in both tabs, and I looked up online what the proper note is and I have read it several times and it has no effect. It's a straight out bug in the game which only seems to trigger if you complete the quest goal before you read the note. This is supposed to be a non-linear open world game in which you can essentially do things in any random order though, so forcing you to have to do things in a linear manner or have a quest hung in your quest tree that is now unsolveable is definitely a game bug and not intentional.
I filed a proper bug report and they'll likely fix it in a future patch, although whether that will fix the game only for people just starting the game who haven't encountered the issue yet, or also fix it for people already playing it who have encountered the bug then moved on to do 2+ more weeks of gameplay or not remains to be seen. I definitely wont be installing a patch that fixes it and then going back to a 3 week old savegame to load before the quest was triggered just to solve the issue anyway. I hope they can fix it in a way that patches existing games in any state, or unlock a console with commands like Skyrim has to set the state of individual quests.
Agreed. I've been having the same issues. Although I don't think I've had a Quest mess up due to doing it out of order (yet), it's probably fair to say that I might not even know if it *had* messed up. I have had a couple work, as in I've been given a quest and been instantly given the option to say I've already done it. Not sure how many can mess up. I do have a specific Trophy, but haven't had the Contract yet (that I know of), but I can sell the Item. So... I'm hanging onto that, just in case. The point is though, I don't trust the game at all, to deal with such things.
If I'd known from the start, I would have kept a close eye on all such letter/notes/Quest Items and made sure I sold each one after I was done with them. Even to the point of jotting it down on a piece on paper in real life. It would still have been a pain, but it's a bit too late now, since I have dozens and dozens of bits of paper and I just have to keep hold of them now. But as you say, they don't appear consistently in the right section. I'm not sure, but I don't actually know if I messed up with the statuette(s)? As you said, I think there are several items that involved Triss, that can be 'taken to her for her to look at', but now I don't think they all triggered. Or I didn't get to ask her. Or...? I don't know. I only asked her about one though, so I have no idea what happened there.
I'm not sure what to do with the notes and books. Maybe I'll just go through them all and read/re-read them and then sell them all, as I'm now in a situation where getting a new note to read, can get lost. And that's a real pain to try and find it, when it's in the wrong section. I tend to be very careful now and note when a Quest doesn't update when I thought it would, then check the Inventory carefully so as to not miss the gold asterix and removed it by mistake. As then I'd just have to hope I could find it without having to go through every one again.
Bigger picture though, for me, is the whole User Interface. It's off topic, but I still have no idea what the one Sort button actually does. It all seems like a huge step back from The Witcher 2. Just finding a Quest to do that's close to where I am, is very time consuming. And lists always default back to the top and reset which subsections are open/closed.
