I don't agree, not even a little. The storytelling is what brings me back to the game; there's so much going on that you can't even appreciate all the little conversations that happen until you've seen the story through to the end and realize some of the truth behind what you'd already taken in. The world is open for adventuring, but there's a living and breathing world there, too... there's a story behind practically everything in it, or some lore to give it a background, and you get to wander.

I don't think the Witcher raised the bar, unless you're more inclined to being led from attraction to attraction in a video game themepark. DI progresses naturally through exploration, where The Witcher works much better if you just find the quests and navigate them. I'd also say that DI bears a subtlety that keeps it involving, and never found that in the Witcher to keep me drawn in to what was going on since how much I cared hinges entirely on whether or not I like Geralt (I don't).

For a party-based RPG, I'd say DI is one of the best of its kind ever made. The only place it loses people is that the journey matters more than the destination, and it's such a huge and meandering trek to see everything that people lose focus along the way. My first playthrough was ~140 hours if I remember right, and most people have trouble paying attention through a 15-20 hour game these days because they just want to beat it and go on to whatever the next hyped up game is. This isn't a game for that kind of person, so it gets savaged on gaming forums.

If this was a 5 or 6/10 game I'd never have finished it once, much less put hundreds of hours into it, and certainly no one giving that opinion honestly would have played through it 3.5 times.