The overarching goal and motivation for the party in ACT 1 is pretty much finding a healer which are all over the place, but the main character naturally does not know which way nor which healer is the best so they're looking anywhere they can for any sign of hope. Whether it's Nettie, Ethel, Halsin, Priestess Gut, Volo, Omeluum, Raphael, the Creche etc.
That's pretty much their drive in ACT 1, hope and despair. Like Astarion says;
"Shop around he says. He seems certain we won't find anything. And he's right, we had no luck so far."Although it may seem like the main character would be shooting straight towards;
The Grove > Nettie > Halsin > Moonrise, narratively Lae'zel makes a far more convincing case than anyone else. So if anything the character narratively would actually just shoot straight for the Creche and ignore the distractions.
But at the same time we as the player are the conductor of the story and our character's personality. If I was given the same options as Nettie gives our main character, hell... I would be looking around anywhere else other than the gobo camp where I might end up roasting over a fire as their meal. I'd first exhaust every possible chance I can before deciding to knowingly walk into an enemy encampment. So if that takes me south or north, it is much better than the most dangerous place there is
However even if the character is bold and courageous, narratively I still do not see them blindly following the narrative past the Goblin camp because once they reach any of the three trigger locations for the Guardian and meet them, they are no longer in immediate danger from ceremorphosis since it's stopped right in the nick of time.
At which point the motivation still remains on finding a healer, but it's no longer an immediate danger so why not shop around at that point. Get equipped, become stronger, prepare for the journey and whatever lies on its path.
Ultimately the motivation for which direction the character ends up going is up to the player to decide, but the actual narrative motivation is pretty much always searching for a cure/healer. Not as obvious as DOS2's source searching, but I kinda like that. It feels more like a journey then and conveys the fact that we are truly lost in a wilderness, rather than a "to the point objective" with a set destination.
