Let me expand on what I was suggesting by way of example. This is a gamified version of a job I did with a few other players in the Mass Effect Fate tabletop RPG.
A prison ship bound for a detention facility on some world has stalled and is locked in orbit around the planet. The auto-defenses have gone up, warding off approach by local authorities. Your squad's job is to go in, find out what happened, and get things back on track. You start the mission by doing a space jump from your ship to the prison barge, avoiding defensive turret fire as you scale the exterior looking for a way in. Once inside, you find that there's been a massive breakout/riot. You have to fight your way past armed prisoners (and maybe mercenaries who had stormed the ship to extract a specific prisoner). At one point, you get locked into a cell block not much bigger than a ME3 multiplayer level and must defend a few waves, culminating in a "boss" fight and an objective to hack a panel for an escape into some alternate path.
Then you are tasked with shutting down the autodefenses so your ship can dock for extraction, following the completion of your primary objective: storming the armory where the most dangerous prisoners have holed up. You may also or instead be assigned random objectives, like extracting data, hostages, or taking out a key side target, instead of just having to storm the armory every time. Maybe there's a fire you have to put out, or a hull breach you have to seal off. In any case, if you succeed, your ship can dock, you can extract, and you get a bunch of points as well as a chance to resupply. But the job's not over: no prison break was going to get these guys out of the system; they had to be going somewhere on-world. Which means somebody else down planetside was footing the bill. Your employers track the source down to a local warlord.
If you successfully did your job, you launch into a new mission, where you land quietly and must stealthily infiltrate, avoiding guards and carefully picking your way in under cover of nightfall (long, open-ish environments, in which you might choose to blow stealth and jump in vehicles to speed things along), making your way toward this warlord's compound. If you failed your objective in the last mission (and didn't fail by simply all dying: you let hostages die, the prisoner escaped on a shuttle, you couldn't shut down the defenses and had to flee), then you lose the point bonus of a success, you lose the chance to resupply, and your stolen shuttle that you escaped on crashes on the opposite side of the compound a similar distance away.
Under a fiery sunset you must fight through the minions sent to intercept your crash and storm the compound. You're tasked with taking out the warlord if you are coming by stealth, tasked with taking out the warlord and his escaped prisoner if you failed. The stealth might hold up until the last moment, when you then must make an escape (yay, vehicle chase), heading for extraction the other way. Or maybe there's a vicious mutiny erupting in the warlord's ranks because of your interruption, and you have to secure an LZ inside the base (more horde defense). If you fail that, you have to book it to an alternate point.
In addition, theres always the chance for random objectives. These objectives could be tailored to specific players, based on class, race, or even personal history: the infiltrator might be given the bonus objective to hack the warlord's personal accounts and steal his money; the asari huntress might be asked to take out a traitorous underling huntress in his ranks. It's up to players to decide whether to pursue or even to share the knowledge of these objectives, convincing their squadmates to help.
In a similar vein to Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system, the game could create nemeses and assign them to players. A sniper tags you in the compound? Not only do your allies get a new objective (extract you to a safe location so you can be revived), now you have a revenge target. You might not see him again this round; he'll escape and go find employment with the Blue Suns, whom you might face off against in another mission -- and when you see him next, he'll have better armor, unique gear, and will do higher damage against you (simulating his desire to finish you off for good). You'll get an objective to get revenge. Should you succeed, there may be a chance, depending on how he dies, that he'll also return -- angrier and more dangerous than ever, ready to thwart you at just the wrong time. Maybe he'll even go through Cerberus-level cybernetic repair every time you defeat him, until after a couple back-and-forths you get a whole mission dedicated to stopping him and the army he's amassed. The warlord and escaped prisoner, above? Could easily be randomly, dynamically generated nemeses of other players.
Or maybe you kill the warlord but the prisoner who escaped in round one escapes again in round two: now, following extraction, your next mission might have you chasing him down a few months later in some warzone, or tailing him on the end of some heist (remember that escaped krogan you failed to kill? Well, him and a band of mercs just kidnapped a diplomat on Ilium. They're holed up in a warehouse in the dockyard. Go get 'im.)
By randomizing events and supplying just enough context to keep you going, players will develop their own narratives that really matter. By continuing play in the face of failure, matches stay fun and fresh and varied. By supplying player-specific objectives and nemeses, the characters we're playing come alive and we feel more attached to them -- because they're more an extension of us. By trimming the fat and the excess we remain focused. The world feels bigger and richer than a thousand square mile open world ever could because, instead of having the time to explore every nook and cranny and bump up against the edges, the invisible walls, the system -- and realizing that it's not actually as big a world as we thought -- we have to just assume the things in our periphery are much larger.
As gamers we tend to explore those limits, those systems, those edges and boundaries -- but that's not realistic. A squad doing a job wouldn't stop to collect flowers or goof off; there's work to be done. The story doesn't wait for us. No, "Hey, I have to stand in front of this vendor comparing loot and upgrades for five minutes," "Oh, well, I'm good so I'll just spin in circles and get bored," or, "We have to watch a lengthy cutscene because I haven't seen it yet," "Ugh, I've seen it ten times; look at that guy's ugly faaaaaaace. Hey, did you see Game of Thrones? Way more interesting than listening to this guy prattle on," or, "Hey, stop what you're doing and come look at how if you drive this car up on this tree it looks like genitalia right before it launches you across the map." There's just no time, no opportunity: there's the job, and you have to remain on-task if you want to succeed -- but even if you don't succeed, your failures will generate their own stories too.
The tighter, neater experience of ME3's multi was way more engaging because of its overall simplicity: you socketed in your own narrative, and that was way more interesting, more engaging, and definitely longer lasting than a dozen open-world, narrative-driven co-op games or MMO's I can think of. You'd still have your deep, cinematic, emotional, complex single-player experience, tailored and perfected just-so, without having had resources diverted from it for a multiplayer narrative. And when you were done with that, or in between that, you could do multi to explore the world, the universe, to do things you couldn't with your single player hero. Each then serves to strengthen the other by providing flavor and detail in the ways it can't. Rather than trying to be everything, do everything, each experience does its aspects all the better, leaving the rest for a different perspective.
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