This was a beautiful and magical thing to discover. Here I am, bumbling around this new open-world game, not really caring too much about the main quest, when a white fox crosses my path. I decide to follow it and it leads me up a mountain to an ancient, mysterious shrine. With a quest in it. It was completely unintended but so rewarding, and I really hope that the next one keeps it. Because getting rewarded for acting like someone in a fairy tale is exactly what these games are for.
I think the true gem of this story is that it explains the inconsistent outcome/reason for this behavior, and hence the enduring community debate.
I.e. a fox can be leading you to a high-triangle-density area (aka treasure), or it can simply be leading you away if no treasure is about
And so players no doubt observed both of these outcomes... and hence the debate! And thus the nuances of the behavior somehow make it more magical than "fox always leads to treasure" simplicity.
This is always the case when you have probabilities in games... there will always be patterns in an individual's series of random numbers, and people will construct a narrative to explain it.
It reminds me of Onyxia in WoW, where the leading theory for a long time was that you needed Damage over time spells (DoTs) on her to prevent her from doing her damaging fire breaths, which would wipe the entire raid group.
Turns out it was just random (confirmed by a developer long after), but it is interesting the meaning that can and will be assigned to random events. Probably the same mechanism that causes myths and eventually religion to form in real life.
Funny, that. In my psychology 101 class, I was thought that random and intermittent rewards work better for conditioning behaviour than consistent rewards.
So in a way, the inconsistency might've pulled more people in.
Games like Gothic had this but scripted. Small yet densely packed maps with rewards everywhere. It's pleasant to see a truly useful application of AI and not just "gamer booster" stuff.
