I started but didn’t finish POE2. As you said it had very little main story, which is an issue that the large, empty open-world games also often have.
But POE 2 is NOT a "large open world". It's your typical network of interconnected small locations you can reach out from a world map.
Is POE2 really a story-driven game if it has almost no main story?
It IS absolutely story-driven (not that this would be automatically a plus, anyway). It's just that very little of that story is "the main plot" and a lot of it is about (quite sizeable) tangent stories.
Agreed on both counts. It's a game that encourages exploration and I think it has the best kind of story for a crpg, one that actually encourages and makes sense to include sidequests in. I find that it's paced in such a way that the various diversions you take don't feel as jarring as they sometimes can in other games. On top of that, every island has a story to it and really feels hand-crafted. Unlike BG3, it actually makes sense to take diversions and explore in Deadfire. (I think Deadfire is a superior game to BG3 in pretty much every respect. The only place I think BG3 outdoes it is sheer quantity, which isn't nothing in a game.)
For me if it is space & exploration vs strong plot, quests & characters, I always pick strong plot, quests & characters!
I'm absolutely in the same camp.
Still I find the OP and many more posts like this on the forum to be incredibly valuable and informative, as they show how flaws and glitches in the game mechanics can leak into storytelling by allowing for nonsensical actions/events or by breaking immersion.
I don't think it's a question of one or the other. Many, many other games have done better jobs with this topic than BG3 and still had wildly praised stories, plot and characters. If Larian really is as good as people claim they are, they could have done a better job than they have.
