Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt's paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.
For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn't care about the stakes of the world.
I sometimes can't wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don't feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.
I had a similar experience in my 5e game, no real combat but basically the intrigued that drove the game got tenfold more complex and was revealed to involve each member of the party in a varying but believable way.
Seperatly, I also played Alice is Missing the month before and it lived up to the hype I wanted, but it's very up.my street. What I seek in an RPG is being able to move between being immersed enough to feel what my character feels when I want it, but when I don't, be able to act as my own drama maker for later. AiM absolutely delivered that for me. It also didn't need magic or tech to deliver any agency which is a big plus to me.