I dunno, I guess if I wanted to make my imagination fill in the gaps, I'd rather read a book: and I do feel a bit short-changed when I see someone else's interpretation of a favourite book either conflict with or fall short of what my imagination conjured up (Jackson's version of LotR is a particularly egregious example for me: they're good films, but they don't mesh at all with how I'd visualised the books, be it characters, pacing or even scenery).
In the case of video games, I'd still rather stick with options as there's scope to do that, within development budgets and timescales of course: all things being equal, if there's the ability to let the player choose, why not go with that?
I'm somewhere in the middle when it comes to things like cinematics: I didn't quite get the same sort of thing as with the Esmerelda example (and in its case a lot of it comes down to the personality that the voice actor conveys: that in itself is a contentious issue and I've seen people use exactly the same arguments for unvoiced, text-only dialogue, especially in the interminable Morrowind vs. Oblivion stand off. For the record, I like both) but I do get the point with The Witcher 3 which is that it was very choreographed and carefully directed. The latter is a rare example where I'm happy playing as someone else's character who has very little input from me, but usually I don't like playing a sort of interactive film. So somewhere in between for me, really. Which I guess D:OS did with its hand-drawn cut-scenes.
Anyway, I do wish 3rd person was an option just for when I felt like using it, but we've been told we're not getting it along with an explanation of why we can't have it!
