Balancing player preferences regarding travel?

[Rukelnikov]

Well, it depends a lot on what "exploring the world" means

Is it gonna be player driven? Like well, lets go to this place in the north, spend some time there and when we bother of that place we go someplace else.

Or is it gonna be the story making them go to specific places?

For the latter you can just incorporate the intrigue and masquerade stuff thru the missions and when the story has them go back to the kingdom whose politics you want the story to flesh out.

For the former, it kinda clashes with the style, trying to force a narrative on a player driven adventure is probably not gonna allow either style to flourish.

What you could do in that case, is instead of them exploring the politics of a kingdom while being in the kingdom, they can explore it by proxy being someplace else. The prelude of the adventure could include the PCs along with a handful of carefully crafted NPCs get stranded somewhere, and have a story akin to Banner Saga, The Pale Beyond, Lost, or the like, where the stuff the PC's do will naturally reflect in the NPCs. One of the NPCs may be pushing them to go to a certain city or contact a certain organization for reasons, two NPCs may quarrel and bicker regularly because the groups they assocciate with have bad blood between them.

For that kind of thing to work, the NPCs should be very consciously designed, a mason can be the proxy for the masons guild, even if he's not someone with rank who can formally represent the organization in world, for the narrative he can be. A couple nobles from allied, neutral or antagonists houses, a spy passing as a tourist or a merchant, an actual merchant who is not part of any formal organization per se, but can be there so the story can incorporate the pov of merchants in general ("house whatever's reign did make the roads safer, but guess what? We are using them roads to get out of the kingdom safely since there's no coin to be made there now, that's how I ended up in this bloody predicament"). Once you have the NPCs designed, and the machinations of the factions determined, the adventure plays itself out, whatever the players do, you would know how the NPCs feel about it, and can thus give the players the freedom to explore the world at their leisure, while simultaneosly unraveling the politics and backstabbing going on in a specific kingdom or city.