But you also have dnd/adnd to derive from, which put much less effort into story telling, and more into setting/emergent stories. Roguelikes, dungeon crawlers, etc offer very, very thin stories wrapping the gameplay (dcss for example boils down to: you want to steal the orb of zot, and its on the 15th floor of this dungeon). Minecraft also gained most of its popularity before it too added a very thin story on top.

But the main thing to realize is that most games don’t have very compelling or interesting stories; at most approaching a marvel film. Yet the succeed regardless.

And even warcraft (I’m assuming WoW), I’d bet good money that 90% of its players don’t have any idea what the plot is, except at the most superficial level.

I think its mostly that the open world genre happened to really only have RPG’s currently available and well funded (I cant even think of any major ones atm beyond bethesda, witcher and bioshock); but there are plenty of games that put zero to little efforts into any kind of story, that it’s not at all obvious to me that its required in open world games.

I’d like to see some of these interviews you’re referencing, if you have links handy.