This is a complete fabrication as Skyrim gives player a lot more opportunities to stray away from main storyline than CP77. Hell, one of the very first thing that either Hadvar or Ralof says to the player after escaping Helgen is "It's probably better if we split up" giving player a perfect opportunity to do pretty much anything else.
People tend to exaggerate Skyrim's main storyline urgency from the very beginning...
It's not any level of fabrication -- it's almost exactly the dialogue used in the exact order it's presented in the game. Lightly paraphrasing is not "fabricating".
Are you implying the player is not strongly pressured to head directly to Whiterun to ensure that the jarl is informed of the dragon attack?
Are you saying that the player is not told that finding the tablet is of the utmost importance?
Are you claiming that the player is not immediately ordered by the jarl to help his men fend off the dragon attacking the watchtower after a messenger dashes in to interrupt the private meeting?
Are you arguing that Balgruuf does not tell the player that there's no denying the Greybeards, pushing the player to head there right away?
Are you saying that Delphine does not say that it's vital they get to the dragon mound before it rises?
^ Are you arguing that this does not create direct, narrative pressure for the player to focus exclusively on the main quest and actively discourages them from free play?
Here, let's do a direct comparison to another Bethesda title created with a very different approach:
Morrowind.
1.) The player arrives in Seyda Neen to be told that there are 3 different options for creating their character "...and the choice is yours."
2.) The player is given a task to deliver a message to Caius Cosades in the town of Balmora, and it's up to them to figure out how.
3.) Investigating how to even get to Balmora, the player is given rough directions, a warning about bandits in a nearby cave, and a tip that taking a silt strider would be the safest and most direct. Then, they're left to go spelunking or to get lost in the countryside if they want.
4.) After several adventures and few caves, most likely, the player arrives in Balmora, finally tracks down Caius -- who then
specifically instructs the player to go away and come back when they're more experienced. This happens several times, actually, with the inherent gameplay designed with open play in mind.
Does this really sound like the system used in Skyrim to you?
I've played through Skyrim probably six or seven times. It's definitely a fun game -- but to get off the rails the narrative puts you on, you need to actively ignore the main quest, and then the game awkwardly picks up then next scene as if it was a few hours later, and you didn't just spend 3 in-game months becoming the bloody Archmage of the Mage's College or something. It's incredibly apparent and extremely distracting.
Still, the game does a poor job of letting player stray from MS to do these activities - you can't justify leaving Jackie to wait for V at the bottom of Megabuilding H10 or Dex that's in the car just around the corner from Misty's place. I suppose you can postpone Meredith/Evelyn quests, though to be honest Dex's messages to hurry up doesn't help in that matter. Unfortunatelly it is still only 1/3 of the content that you can do without feeling like you're screwing up something important, while doing the rest (2/3) of the content is the matter of if you completely ignoring the fact that V is dying. For me this is restrictive.
And here you're grasping at straws.
No, you can't really ignore the very first quest in the entire game after arriving in Night City that sets the stage for the whole storyline when Jackie says to meet him out front. It's also relatively hard to ignore the meeting with Dex immediately after. There: now the player knows what the main deal is.
After you get out of the car with Dex, and for the remainder of the entire game, it is perfectly justifiable for the player to play for weeks on end without ever touching the main quest. I sure did. And I never once felt like it was avoiding anything. It's perfectly conceivable that days or weeks would pass between the meeting with Dex and the meeting with the Maelstrom gang. In fact -- it actually makes
more sense for the player to have been off gallivanting around NC before hand, as the next time we see Jackie, he's had enough time to make money and buy a pretty expensive motorcycle.
And this is how the rest of the game plays out, with main story missions being self-contained "chapters" that do not ever leave the player feeling like they're "ignoring" the main quest by engaging in open play. Like that quest, many parts of the game feel much, much better paced if the player intentionally takes on some gigs or side-missions: Eva's kidnapping, recovery, and slow degradation into depression and suicide...getting back in contact with Takemura...whichever love interest the player decides to pursue...etc.
I'd say there are very few games that offer such excellent storytelling while
also creating such free-form play. Like Morrowind, the storyline constantly interjects "pauses" where the player can either continue on with the main quest, or feel justified in pursuing side content for a while, and both work very smoothly. The one and only narrative mistake the game makes is Viktor stating that you only have weeks left to live because the engram will eat your brain. And, like I've argued earlier, it's easy enough to dismiss: he was wrong. It takes longer.
Skyrim is essentially the archetype for compromising your story almost completely to make open world possible (and Oblivion before it). The storyline is a series of random events that feel hugely contrived and barely make any sense at all -- it is absolute nonsense that is not carried through into the world itself -- culminating, of course, with the player being the most important person in the universe and people still telling him to get out of the way as if nothing ever happened. Character motivations, if they exist at all, are "I am a racist nationalist", "I am an imperial conqueror" and "I have a beard".
By design, Bethesda's games prioritise freedom of action in the open world over good storytelling. It's a different way of making games and they are good at that. But no one plays Skyrim for its mastery of plot and it's not for no reason that arguably the most highly regarded story in all the Elder Scrolls games isn't even a main story at all, but the Dark Brotherhood side quests from Oblivion. It's about the only time TES even got close to good writing.
Quite so, and it didn't start off that way. The plot for Arena was camp and filler.
The plots for both Daggerfall and Morrowind were
excellent. I still say that Morrowind is the best "prophecy / chosen one" plotline I've ever seen in a game. Man, was that a
haunting story! It's just a shame that the games themselves simply don't hold up with modern audiences. (Lots of the mechanics and grahics are downright jank by today's standards, if still cool.)
Oblivion's story was "alright"-to-"meh". And Skyrim's premise is absolutely awesome, but I agree completely that the storyline doesn't truly live up to what it could have been. The later Beth games are all about the world, exploration, and combat. (I think Beth could hang the story altogether, actually.
)
Whereas, I feel that Cyberpunk nailed its approach. The world of Night City is realized in amazing detail, and it forms the perfect backdrop for the story being told. The narrative itself if gripping and though-provoking. They create very fleshed out characters, and powerful moments. If anything, I feel the sheer level of random combat can detract a little from the overall experience. It did tend to make the experience feel very "game-y" to me, weird as that may sound. Whereas, in TW3, for example, the fights that happened seem to make more sense and be more satisfying to get through.
To me, it's a real shame that more people didn't really seem to engage with the story.
