It does feel like you have a surfeit of options at any point. Being able to craft, hack, sneak, and full assault/melee all at once is bit crazy. Why does V even need a team with his skillset? Now the closest thing is whether you install something in place of your cyberdeck, either berserk or bullet time. give up hacking to be Max Payne? Hmm.
It's funny because with 50 attribute points and 100 attribute ranks you're theoretically pretty pigeon-holed, but I can still only see a couple variations for overall character types. Melee or guns, stealth or assault... maaaaybe tech versus cyber if you want to be extremely generous. Pick one of each and you've got two playthroughs, but not sure you could find a significantly different third one. To be fair Deus Ex mostly had the same splits, but this is trying to be a bigger, Bethesda-ish game.
What they seem to have done is make it so that you do have to specialize in "melee" versus "ranged" versus "magic," but there seem to be different ways you can specialize in each - for example, you can specialize in melee by building up relevant Body skills, but if you haven't gone down the Body route that much you can also do so by specializing in cyber implants and getting the Mantis claws. Or you can specialize in rifles and pistols by going down the Reflex route, but you have to go down the Body route to specialize in shotguns or machine guns. On the other hand, you can specialize in Tech and use Tech weapons to their fullest advantage, and Tech weapons come in most of the flavours (pistols, shotguns, etc.), which means you don't necessarily have to build up Body or Reflexes as much to use ranged, you can be a Techie whose guns just pack a huge punch.
There's specialization and sacrifice, but there's also a bit of crossover so you can round out your build, and some things that are on the trees can also be gotten via implants (e.g. I just noticed today that there's a cyber mod that gives you the ability to see the hit area for your grenade, which is also a perk in the Engineering tree, and I've seen a few things like that).
It's a much better system than TW3, that's for sure. They've obviously thought about progression a lot and worked on it since that game (which was truly shit tier in terms of progression and building).
Ultra min-maxing is good in D&D style, stat-based simulation games, but I've never liked games where you're in 1st or 3rd person but they push you to ultra-min-max. In games where you feel more like you are your avatar, I like to hybridize to some extent. Kind of to a Golden Mean level, where you're mostly specializing in something to be ultra good at it, but you have a secondary thing that you have decent competence in, and a few things that you're moderately competent in, and then a few things that you've sacrificed altogether. It means you can experiment to find a comfortable playstyle that fits the game and your mood for the game. And this game does that quite well, in that it balances progression through use and progression via stat assignment quite well. It actually out-Bethesdas Bethesda in that regard.
SJWs don't know anything about history beyond slavery and Hitler, or about politics beyond "Nazi" and "woke."
