Mhm.
Perhaps these quests change as history walk, what is already quite something.
In terms of open world pacing vs story. I think a decent way to offset the disconnect would be to have some more "important" missions have a timer and if you don't hit that timer, you get a bad end to the mission, and enough of those will leave you with a bad end to the story. Similar to how if for some reason you decided to dick around after the crew was abducted in ME2, you would have crew members die.
Certainly balancing a meaningful story with an engaging open world environment will be a difficult task mainly because you have that third party variable. Being player agency. The player will set the pace of the story, so having subtle guide rails, or at least consequences to not taking it seriously will be helpful. Having these guide rails only effect "important" missions would allow for freedom in the more slow paced parts of the game to screw around and do sidequests.
At the very least the open world seems to be interesting and have a more natural flow to it in TW3, it feels real. In some open world games, for example two worlds two. The world doesn't feel natural, it doesn't seem to work nor does it make sense. It seems to flow somewhat realistically, similarly to what Bethesda does. CDPR seems to have put thought into how the world would function were it a real place, instead of just placing things around randomly because it looked neat.
Also in reference to the open world, I like what they've done with the three cities we have. Novigard, Oxenfurt, and Vizima will give us a look at a city controlled by the Northern Kingdoms, a city caught in the middle of the conflict, and a city controlled by the Nilfgaards.
That post sort of rambled a bit, but I'm slightly drunk so whatever.