It definitely feels like you need to do basically everything that exists in order to level up enough. That converts "side quests" into "mandatory quests", which is not great. And yeah, D:OS 1 had this same problem as well.
I finished the alpha Patch 0 in September, but in the December patch, I felt a little lost as well. I was pretending I was a new player and I didn't know everything. Because I made a couple different decisions, and missed out on saving Elohdi, and playing with the kid in the grotto, which left me short of ways to go to get into the fort, and short of XP.
I eventually had no choice at all except to turn Stingtail into Griff because fighting him at level 1 would be a death sentence. I did save him by killing Silence, but I was pretty railroaded into taking only that course of action. That got me Amryo free, which told me of the trap door into the prison. Being level 2 I did at least beat the crocodiles and the arena, but reaching level 3 took a lot of exploring and finally killing some silent monks for the last little bits of XP needed to reach level 3.
I am still stuck in the prison area trying to figure out if it is possible for me to reach level 4 before leaving the prison and facing level 4 enemies, and which fights are possible for me to reasonably do.
