Yes, playing it as anything but a rails game seems to be wildly out of character once the story has progressed beyond the initial handshake. The open world back

Yes, playing it as anything but a rails game seems to be wildly out of character once the story has progressed beyond the initial handshake. The open world backdrop makes the railed story far more immersive than an actual rails tunnel that you cannot leave could ever be, but only if you mostly ignore it. And the main story track is pulling much stronger than in something like Skyrim. With this game it's probably a generational thing on more than one level: not only do most people tend to grow out of side quest competitionism at some point, I suspect that older parts of the audience are also drawn into this particular main story stronger than their younger peers. It's just so perfectly 1990ies vibe that you almost forget that people did not in fact have mind machine interfaces and fancy prosthetic limbs when they sent their first email on AOL. The game represents exactly how people born around 1977 remember the movies of their youth (entirely unlike how you'd perceive them if you'd see them today).