Yeah, but for some reason when a small team does make a story-heavy SP game, it's usually either crappy pixel art (miles behind actual oldies, which were usually doing their best not to look pixellated) or RPGMaker level 2D art as well. Such "art" games usually don't involve much gameplay, quite a few are 2D platformers and even if they aren't, they usually aren't 3D. Why can't we have a story-rich that also has decent graphics? I'm not talking modern AAA level, but at least enough not to be an eyesore. For some games, even a simple, objective-based campaign based on a series of multiplayer maps could be fun (kind of what SW:Battlefront 2 did), as long as it was well written.
And even with games like Naval Action, this concept would've worked well as an RPG. Singleplayer doesn't have to be scripted, quest-based stories can work quite well. And even without a large-scale story, simply having an open-world SP game with good gameplay can be fun (X series, for instance, though they've started to more resemble economic games after X3). The reason I was fooled for so long was that I kept expecting it to be something like Freelancer (which had an MMO-style multiplayer), with the multiplayer part being here first because it's easier to start testing stuff with (you don't need an AI, a pair of testers will do just fine) and SP being added later. I went to the forums after Crizza's comment, and saw it was an MMO at the core.
