Prime Junta
Guest
This worries me for some reason. Not that it can't be circumvented, but it pretty much destroys any chance of character-driven story. It relegates the important events to happen in the background, with you just having to react to them, not being in the conversation, but being told what happens. This is a major problem in PoE1 as well. It CAN work (BG1 for example), but it's passive and it actually reduces the chance for you to "do what you want".
P1 wasn't really structured this way though. It's a classic three-act story, with a bit of freedom inside the chapters.
They're going for a Fallout: New Vegas style structure here. It doesn't preclude character-driven stories, it just means that these stories will have to be structured in different ways. For example, they could be related to your companions or such. Since intra-party relationship shenanigans are a major focus, I think that's what they want to do. How well they'll succeed is a different matter of course.
In principle there's nothing there to preclude Planescape: Torment level of personal story about the structure: that was a voyage of self-discovery, of finding pieces of a big puzzle and putting them together. That doesn't need to happen in linear progression: the pieces can be scattered around the world leaving it up to you to find them and assemble them; some trigger events could be bound to specific pieces, others to combinations of pieces, yet others to the number of pieces you've discovered.
I would be most surprised if it turns out like that though. They're going after BG2, not PS:T here.