I did a full playthrough on normal mode on Friday. Kudos, it's a really brilliant game. Hugely enjoyed it, the dialogues were good, the pacing was excellent for things being largely brought to a head in the last 10 days of the playthrough, and the balancing challenge of keeping everything together was really interesting.
I'm not sure I did super well at it - died a few times and my endings felt rather mixed, but that's probably normal for a first run. I decided to try and help people which I had some limited success at on a personal level, but did pretty horribly at the big-picture stuff. I was generally poor through the whole game, there were definitely some BIG inefficiencies or things I realised too late to reverse.
The worst of these was the thing at Creeks where you get them to clear the tree and it says need to know the roads and get there before midday, it really wasn't clear how to do this, I eventually triggered it somehow but I had several occasions where I basically wasted a day by trying a different combination of resting place and moves only for it to fail again. Is it that it needs every other eastern road sidequest to be completed? Because I'd assumed from the text that it just needed me to have recently walked all the paths from the tree to creeks, which clearly didn't work.
Regarding my choices and endings:
My biggest error was not tackling White Marshes and the undead somehow. I just didn't manage to progress the story there - I think maybe I needed to tell the guy about that missing purse I found, but I wasn't sure that was a good idea so didn't do it, and at the endgame I decided to try and unseat Thaila (may be misspelling some names) after unravelling the mystery of the ruined village... which I also failed to do so, and wasn't sure why, so that ended up as a lose-lose. At least her daughter got to go off and found an adventuring company, so that was nice. My only gripe about the way that plays out is that it feels really rough if one of the things you've focused on is completing all the Creeks quests - it was one of the only bits I actually felt I'd done well by the endgame because I'd fully cleared the eastern road, so having the village flattened by the undead made the ending feel a much bigger downer than it would otherwise have been.
I did find Asterion and completed the island trip: my company was Thaila's daughter, Dalit the huntress, the sullen forager guy you can hire, and the nameless bandit - but I didn't properly negotiate with the Hidden Tribe first, so I was left still very unsure of what had gone on and what exactly I'd really found there. I wasn't sure how to progress on that one, I assumed when they asked for unusual/good alcohol that this would be something you could get from Foggy, so wasted time there and then didn't work out what else to get them that I could afford (they ask for good blades, but I wasn't sure if better axes counted and those were really expensive).
I cured the plague, that's about the one thing that went unequivocally well. It was really unclear how much blood/magic you had to give the tree and whether it needed some of both, so I don't know if I wasted some valuable resources there by e.g. buying more magic things.
The Pelts Inn did well in endgame, I helped them out plenty. The northernmost village kind of survived OK-ish, the villages in general went for trading rather than full imperial absorption which I quite liked.
I did have one persistent actual bug, which was that bits of game text and labels kept doing this:
Generally unloading and reloading a page or text section, or sometimes rolling over bits of text, would fix it, but it did keep happening seemingly randomly and was rather annoying.
