With the great amount of freedom that players will have to choose the course and nature of their adventures in Riftrunner, why did the developers feel it was important to implement a storyline that is at least partly predetermined?

We feel it is necessary for the player to have a goal or a set of goals in the game at all times - we feel it is not very good gameplay to just drop a player in a world and not explain to him what he has to do. People easily loose interest if they don?t have something to focus on. But we feel it is equally important to let players discover things for themselves and get rewarded (in the form of getting quests) for the exploration they do.