u/Careful_Employee_918

I’m curious what things you did on your first playthrough that felt completely logical at the time, but now, after finishing the game, you realize were incredibly stupid.

I’ll start.

After leaving the nautiloid and talking to the first few companions, I got this huge sense of urgency - like we were all about to die any minute and time actually mattered. So I barely did any long rests unless it was absolutely necessary. My party was constantly exhausted, half-dead, surviving almost entirely on health potions. I think I only did like 3–4 long rests during the entirety of Act 1.

I also reached the goblin camp really early, basically right after visiting the grove. Since I’m not a very experienced gamer, the camp immediately felt like “enemy territory” where you’re supposed to avoid attention, not talk to anyone, and definitely not start fights. So I barely explored it and skipped almost all of the content there.

But then I accidentally talked to one random goblin who mentioned the Nightsong. Suddenly I get a quest to find it, and I’m thinking: “Wow, that’s so cool. I just randomly talked to an NPC and unlocked this probably super rare secret quest. I wonder how many players even found this.”

So obviously I immediately start looking for the Nightsong and head straight into the Defiled Temple. Reminder: all of this is happening after maybe one long rest total.

Then suddenly Astarion stops me and confesses he’s a vampire - because of course I never got the bite scene at camp. I remember thinking, “Weird place for this conversation, but okay.”

We keep going, and then Raphael appears. Again, I’m like: “Wow, I wonder how many people even meet this guy.” Since I already believed the Nightsong quest was some hidden rare content, I also assumed Raphael was some super obscure encounter you only get if you happen to go this route.

Then I enter the Underdark.

Thank god I was terrible at combat, because after the first real encounter completely wiped my party, I finally realized something was very wrong and these enemies were probably way too high level for me. So I went back to the goblin camp and decided maybe I should do other quests first before continuing my “super secret rare Nightsong questline.”

Honestly, if I hadn’t gotten destroyed in that fight, I probably would’ve wandered deep into the Underdark before doing basically anything else in Act 1 and completely overwhelmed myself trying to navigate it without understanding what was even happening.

Edit: Wow, this blew up! It’s been super interesting reading all the comments and seeing how different everyone’s first playthrough was.

Summarizing the replies, here’s the top 10 “first playthrough mistakes” people seem to make:

1. Missing companions entirely: being scared of the portal and never recruiting Gale, never finding Lae’zel (or killing her), and somehow never meeting Wyll and/or Karlach.
2. Killing Karlach 😭
3. Killing Scratch 😭😭😭
4. Kissing the mind flayer on the beach.
5. Accidentally failing the tieflings/grove questline (usually by stealing the idol, going to the Mountain Pass too early, etc.).
6. Completely missing the crèche and thinking only one path to the Shadow-Cursed Lands is available at a time.
7. Releasing the brake…
8. Skipping all of Moonrise Towers because it feels like a “final battle area” you should avoid for as long as possible.
9. Never figuring out how to lift the Shadow-Cursed Lands curse.
10. Failing to resolve the Shadowheart/Lae’zel conflict and letting one kill the other/Kill Astarion on the bite night.

Another very common answer was shit-talking Vlaakith, but honestly I don’t even count that as a first-time mistake because I do it intentionally every single playthrough.

Honorable mention to the people who somehow didn’t realize you could create your own character and played Origin characters purely by accident. That one killed me 😂

I’m rewatching and I’ve just reached the scene where Hatice confronts Ibrahim and Nigar about the supposed affair.

Instead of continuing to deny it and insisting that Nigar has Matrakçı’s child, Ibrahim suddenly admits the affair is real and that the child is his.

What was the point of that? At that moment, Hatice was already close to believing it was just another one of Hürrem’s manipulations, and there was really no concrete way to prove anything anyway. No DNA test or real evidence.

If Ibrahim actually cared about Hatice, you could maybe explain it as him finally breaking under guilt and choosing honesty, even if it cost him his position or even his life. But even that doesn’t fully fit, because by then he seems to care more about his status and the Sultan’s trust than about her.