I had to follow a guide in order to get as far as I did with the first one. It's just something about the questing structure and the fact that the descriptions tell you so little as to what you should be doing, often even contradicting themselves. Quests in the first game were often treated as standalone, but the reality is that most of them were different steps towards the main quest, causing much confusion when it came to certain quests in the quest log if you tried doing them before they were able to trigger.