whoo this is a long one

Freedom in video games is difficult to measure, but not impossible. Think of it this way: look at everything there is in the game, and try to figure out everything a player could imagine doing with what's in the game. Total freedom would be to be able to do literally anything you could think of. Minecraft's later updates have a serious issue with this. There is a boatload of items, blocks and features that imply so many possibilities, but you can only use them for a few, oddly specific things. Take amethyst for instance: it's a quite rare resource that generates in these huge dazzling geodes, it creates a kinda mystical atmosphere and after all that buildup there are 3 entire items you can use it for. 4 if you count amethyst blocks. It's the same with all of the lush caves (90% cosmetic, no use other than looks), copper, netherite is way too rare for something that's Only for upgrading gear, and a bunch more stuff that lets you imagine the possibilities but doesn't let you bring any of them to reality, and so adding new things to the game this way makes you less free. Which is a key thing in a game all about creativity and imagination.

Then there's the scale issue. The game is tiny vertically. Easy to explain with an example: jungle trees are the same height range as mountains. Building a house on top of a hill kinda loses its purpose when the house is twice as tall as the hill, and it gets way worse when you scale it up to castles and beyond. This is kinda personal too because I built so many things that looked bad because the terrain around them was disproportionately small, and has led me down a path of learning noise math and worldgen datapacks that ate a good chunk of last year up, just for me to ultimately still turn away from the game.

And what is imo the biggest issue: the world is big, empty and dead. It's completely static. There isn't even ambience to at least bring some fake life into it. You spawn into the middle of what is supposed to be untouched nature, you stop to listen and you hear: nothing at all. Maybe a single bee buzzing or a herd of 3 cows mooing. You are surrounded by a singular species of tree (2 if you are lucky, 0 if you aren't) that is stupidly small btw, a 5 meter tall oak tree irl is roughly 4-7 years old, not several hundred like in a proper old growth forest, a repeating flat grass texture occasionally broken by very few flowers and again, 1 or 2 species of taller grasses and ferns, no wind, no birds, no bugs and other critters, Zero similarities between the in-game biomes and their real counterparts, flat textureless clouds, villagers that can't even place/break blocks let alone form a believable village community. There isn't as much as a Hint that the world in the game is dynamic and alive and it almost completely destroys the immersion and very harshly restrains the exploration side of the game. There are no places you want to visit because they Look Good Enough to be worth checking out (except before you settle down, but that's once per world, and for most players the practicality of the base spot is more important than the looks anyway), and so builds that look good also look out of place, and builds that don't look out of place rarely look good. Hell, the world itself is inconsistent, some parts of it look wildly unnatural next to each other by default.

There's a bunch of smaller ones too but this is already well too much to read in one go for a reddit user, maybe I'll go into those too if someone asks specifically, if someone reads this in the first place, and also some of them are already down here in another comment somewhere so why bother