New player here and a tad confused.

My partner and I just purchased this game and are tearing through a couch co-op run through. Neither of us have ever played DOS/DOS2 and are having a lot of fun with the gameplay, characters, world, etc.

But we feel like we accidentally missed the story?

We are about 10-12 hours in. We were prisoners and helped rescue some folks on a boat. We ended up in Fort Joy and got collared. We won an arena battle and one character got deemed "the one" and de-collared. Now we are running around outside Fort Joy exploring. We found a camp with a nice Exter fellow, a dragon imprisoned by a witch, a disastrous maze, some lovely flaming pigs, etc. But we feel like we are just flailing around.

There's something about "screechers", we never really figured out what Fort Joy was for other than some Magisters don't like people who have "soul" or something, and we definitely have no clue what this "the one" business is about. There doesn't seem to be any main bad guys. We aren't really sure what our "goals" are other than getting off this darned island and removing the rest of the party's collars. We found that with some good strategy we could survive a lot of fights. Is there a good chance we accidentally fought our way through some obstacles we were supposed to role play our way through and develop the story?