Are you against games giving you more options?

[Yerm]

options are good, but to a certain degree.

because of Minecraft, we had a short period of time where a ton of block-based open-ended sandbox games came into existence. none of them were any good because they were just blank slates with nothing to actually do. a game as open ended as that is bad, and at least with Minecraft there were enough tools to create something out of it.

some good examples of games that give you option would be Skyrim, Pokemon, or Undertale. In Skyrim the world is clearly defined, you have free will, but there are laid out objectives for you to complete. Pokemon is a linear story, but your team is free for you to customize from the beginning of the game, nobody is telling you which pokemon to use. Undertale has multiple endings based on the decisions you make, even ones that you werent entirely aware of at the time, making the world feel alive and real.

but then there are games like Mario where you have no options, the game is entirely linear, and its still fun. So i guess the golden rule is - make the game first, and add options later.

now let me loop around to something you mentioned about how people think options are bad because "thats not the way they were meant to be played". well, imagine it like this. for books, while you can read it in any order you want, most books, at least the well written ones have a theme that the reader is meant to understand by the end of the book. not playing a game the way it was meant to be played could be seen as the parallel to not understanding the book the way it was meant to be interpreted. if you skip over a battle, you dont understand the hardships that your character faced, and you deliberately skipped over an obstacle that the game dev put there to challenge you. its the same as skipping a chapter because you dont like it. the problem is that you did pay for a story, but then refused to have the capacity to hear it the way it was meant to be heard, which some people find disrespectful to the people who made it.