The most recent game that perfectly illustrates that too much choice actually ends being no choices at all because everything becomes the same is Age of Wonders 4. Every race can be everything, and at the end you end up an amalgamation of all options. Someone referred to too much choices as "the integer overflow of game design" which I think is beautiful.
If no choices matter, you in reality have no choices to make. It's differences and meaningful choices that makes anything interesting. I want races to be distinct. That's... that's what makes them interesting. Races being just "skins" for a character is exhaustingly boring. Half-races being removed as a distinct people is also really distasteful in my opinion.
Precisely what I first thought about when I saw the changes.
If it's all about choice and freedom, then how come about every "race" there ends up the same 2-3 end results, or people just play the "meta" combinations with whatever look they want to slap on them?
Not to mention that the cultures are still basically the old races. So the artisans are just dwarves, that can cross mountains and do geological surveys, as dwarves always did, but they can now wear the frog skin or whatever. It ends up being others cosplaying as dwarves, pretty much.
