It depends on how you define "story-driven". I think it's meant as "controlled/directed/staged/linear experience" here.why does open world and story driven have to be mutually exclusive?
But I also think it's not about absolute terms. It's more about ratios and how much of each you prefer.
Simple example:
Version A:
You have a main quest. To reach the next location in your journey you get a small cutscene and are transported to the spot to experience the story there. You can explore the space a bit but only to a limited account. The main quest is always at least as "dominant" as the side stuff and you can't get away from it, at least not far.
Version B:
You have a main quest. To reach the next location in your journey you have to travel there yourself which takes already quite some time. On the way there you can just do what you want. You could kill 1000 wolves, save 5 towns and plough 3 women. And when you finally reach the spot of your next main quest you've spent already 25 hours into the game and you've almost already forgotten what the main story was all about. The side stuff is huge compared to the main quest and there is a lot of content that isn't really directly connected to your main journey.
As you can see, version A is much more linear in terms of story-telling. You follow a certain, predefined path with some, but only limited space for exploration. The main focus is on the main story though. That's a very-story driven approach, simply because the story is the main element of the game. In version B the story can of course also be very important but it has to share its place at least with exploration. So it's a story-and-exploration-driven game at least and not "only" a story-driven game. It's a question of focus. Making a big world with much side content and stuff to find always takes away from the focus on the story or main narrative. The "share of game elements" is bigger for exploration here, obviously. And from that, problems can arise for storytelling in general. In the last video from Gamespot one of the CDPR guys said that he hated it when you get lost in a game and forgot what the main story was all about. Therefore you can play side stuff after you finished the main storyline. That' nice in theory but the practice looks way different - at least in my experience. People still tend to do all the side stuff (at least the people who really get into the game) before doing the main story, and obviously the more interesting and exciting the side stuff the more you likely do the stuff. And experienced gamers now that at one point you might lose interest in a game. That's just natural. You get fed up with a game, satisfied, saturated. You want something fresh. So you keep the main storyline as a motivation to continue. And of course you want to be strong and you want to level up. So that's all making you going away from the story, "losing the red line in the process". In a game that focuses less on exploration and more on story-telling that can't really happen, at least not to the same extend. Like in Witcher 2 with its act structure you can only do so much side content at a time before you have to continue the main quest. That way you never lose focus. And of course there is a sense of urgency that cannot be reached in an open world game where most people and events just wait for you to finally come by. That lacking sense of urgency is a real problem in open world games and from what I've heard CDPR couldn't solve that properly neither. The more freedom the player has the more difficult it gets for the developer to maintain a certain sense of urgency and to build up tension. You might win interesting stories on the side but you might lose the overall exciting plot, boldly spoken.
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