Are you talking about D:OS ? ;P Game ends if your 2 chars die. And you are dropped on a beach as source hunter with no notion what source magic even is. Or what a source hunter is. (Sorry, I don't mean to be snide, but that just jumped at me ;P)
To be honest, I fully expected the playable part we got during the alpha ( and now the beta ) to be the first chapter, but there would be a playable prologue or something before that. Looks like I was wrong, but who knows.
On the other hand, D2 kind of began the same way, you are thrown into a story were things are taken for granted. But, to be, again, honest, D2 didn't really master narration : the story was cool, but it wasn't very well told. Sometimes you felt like there had been big changes in the blink of an eye, during a fade to black or just a cut...
And indeed, I never could bring myself to really play BG2! After what we could call the prologue, in Irenicus' jails, we are suddenly left to our own device in that giant, GIANT, city. Sure we go and explore, but the sheer amount of unsorted things to do quickly got the best of me. What's worse is that, here again, you do not have a clue what "difficulty" the quest you decide to undertake actually are, and, while this is quite realistic, it can prove very frustrating too. Hence the fact the whole game ( or rather what I played of it ) felt like a giant trial and error, meaning "I spend a long time going from A to B, just to die because I'm not strong enough". In short I felt like I was wasting my time getting frustrated by a game I had no idea what I was supposed to do since everything was pre-determined. Same thing with Might and Magic X legacy, actually : it's frustrating when you are told "Can you do X" or "can you go there Y", when the game isn't allowing you to do it at this stage because you just aren't strong enough.
BG1 in that regard was more linear, but it really help securing a good flow in the story. BG2 had a lot of very well done quests and an incredible content overall, but alas, I never could bring myself to ... well, plan what I had to do.
In contrast, Elder Scrolls games enable the player to go wherever they want, which can also be very overwhelming and, most often, actually IS overwhelming, but since they ( recently ) adopted the autoscaling system, you won't be punished for going somewhere too dangerous. In previous ES, you could flee fights easily anyway since it was all realtime. And you could rely on your acrobatics skills ( I mean, with you mashing the Jump and Run shortcut ) to avoid encounters.
But I digress. We're talking D:OS, here, and I think that so far they succeeded in giving us both freedom and directions. It's far more easy to see when you're threading in dangerous/deadly territory. But we still have to see the full scope of the content. Maybe later on, the game will effectively turns out to be way more open and further zones will actually give you room for exploration, and planification...
