My point on story wasn't that it shouldn't have an important role. It should, my point was that story is independent from gameplay.
I know what you mean about interconnected quests and the like.
Ever play Fallout? Each quest had great character to it, you could interact with tons of people. I don't mind NPCs with things to say, I hate the majority of RPGs that advertise themselves as having deep NPC interactions but falter in comparison to some more advanced games.
I liked Arcanum despite its heavy flaws for its character, story, and the dialog and NPCs. But Arcanum also had deep character creation, there was a lot of customization.
I think I phrase it best when I say, I don't care about the story the game gives you, at the most it's a just a superflous bonus. What I do care about is the story that the game gives you the liberty of forming, so you define your character through what you do and how people react.
Fallout did that, the later Ultimas did that, Arcanum did that, lots of RPGs did that.
Planescape did not do that, everything was immediate and separated. It had a great story, but that got in the way of nearly everything else. They pounded on dialog in order to make their game unique while forgetting that gameplay is the foundation on which the player's personal story is built on.
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