Once you're done with character creation, you're thrust directly into the main plotline. It seems that Kuldahar, one of the Ten Towns in the Dale, is being assaulted by an unknown evil. Your party joins a militia leaving the town of Easthaven for Kuldahar but, shortly into the game, you find your party alone and unable to turn back. In other words, your main objective is to wade through a host of evil minions while searching for an Ultimate Bad Guy to kill. To explain for novices, this translates into plenty of hiking, fighting, looting, and dungeon-eering.
Characters advance in level very rapidly.
The few non-violent characters in the game exist mostly to arm and shelter your party, before you're directed to the next batch of monsters. On that note, I should mention the enhancements Black Isle has added to this iteration of the Infinity engine. Only major plot-related conversations are broadcast to the whole party, which is a tremendous improvement in terms of game flow. Also very welcome is the tweaked pause feature. RPG's let you pause and issue commands to characters in the main view window but the games would unpause the moment you went to an inventory window.