Cyberpunk 2077

For the first hours of heavily scripted prologue the game looks and feels great. But then the veil drops, you’re introduced to the open world of Night City and it is just... so underwhelming. It gradually starts occurring to you that this game is a poor man’s version of GTA V, with a cliche story and annoying mechanics: - NPCs are really really dumb - they don’t interact with the world, don’t really react to your actions apart from crouching when “scared”. They walk without any purpose like mindless zombies spitting out one liners when you try to talk to them. Nothing like in Skyrim, where NPCs had their daily routines and full dialogue trees, not even like in GTA V or RDR 2, where they seemed dumb but more conscious of their environment. - Cars - driving is just OKAY, feels a bit like Sleeping Dogs, BUT - in story moments when you’re the passenger the ride feels sooo stiff and artificial it’s almost funny. And completely immersion breaking. - Road traffic is as dumb as pedestrian NPCs - you can jam whole blocks of streets by parking your bike bit off the pavement. - When you do crime, the police just likes to spawn from nowhere even in dead-end alleys. - No car tuning/modification. - No garages to store your stolen cars in. - No hairstylists, tattoo artists, plastic surgeons - what you make your character look at the start they stay that way till the end. - Clothes are not about style but their armour rating, so you eventually end up looking like a dumpster. - Not much to do in general in the Night City apart from missions. No side activities, mini games, interactions. Despite great visuals, the city feels dead and fake. - Bullet sponge enemies - something that breaks all immersion for me - forget about killing the baddies in one headshot with your powerful new smart rifle - it’s gonna be more like 5-10 headshots. - Bugs everywhere! The game’s nothing like they promised, feels shallow and rushed, and I’m afraid no amount of patches will fix that.

It's with a heavy heart and after a lot of 'fixing' done that I'm writing this... To summarise the things I've tried: · clean install of the latest GFX drivers, · checked the integrity multiple time, · re-downloaded the entire game and · even dropped all settings to low. The result is the same: crash to desktop. The furthest I've managed to get is going through the character creation (x6 now) and ripping off the patch off V's jacket in the nomad path. To CDPR - I really rooted for you guys. I absolutly support DRM free games and addored playing the Witcher I/II/III but this is pretty bad. Here's my peace of mind if it even matters at this point: In the future please don't announce a launch date until you know you have a well polished game on your hands. Also, word to the wise: tired, overworked, developers doing "voluntary" (or otherwise) crunch end up creating more bugs than they fix (look it up, there's research on this particular topic). This basically tends to create an environment ripe for unplayable and unstable software messes rolling on marketing hype. I know hotfixes and large patches will eventually be published and then the majority that had issues will be able to enjoy a mostly stable version of the game. To be clear this is not a good attitude which is sadly all too prevalent in the software industry. I get it, software is hard and take a lot of time and care to get right but this "let's ship it now and deal with getting it to work lated" kinda attitude is just plain bad in my opinion. Ship it when it is actually done. I'll edit this if and when I can actually play a game without crashing.

The gameplay is decent, but almost everything else is either extremely buggy or runs rather poorly. I wasn't expecting max settings on my dated GPU (R9 Fury) but I was expecting something more than 1080p30 on low settings considering it's supposedly the recommended GPU. The plethora of glitches and dumb AI also don't help. It's a shame because it seems like the game itself has a lot of effort put into it, but they didn't bother putting any effort into any of the technical aspects, to the point where the game feels less like a CDPR game and more like a typical rushed Bethesda game, only it arguably runs even worse.

Quite frankly, it plays horrible with keyboard and mouse. There's mouse acceleration with no way of turning it off exacerbated by the fairly above average input-lag this game has and actions are mapped out with gamepad controllers in mind making it unintuitive and cumbersome using a keyboard, driving is also entirely made with analog input in mind making steering with a keyboard feel ultra touchy to the point of feeling near broken and certainly not any fun. Remapping keys also seems to be limited and/or broken, can't toggle crouch or aim. There's quite the list of options to toggle in settings though, but lacks any AA options and you're stuck with TAA with no way to turn it off, creating fever-haze like oddly blurry visuals with the frame pacing/input feel issues that are common tradeoffs with TAA, ultimately baring you from setting the option that will have the most impact on the visuals. I've only played 2 hours of the game, but it's been an unpleasant struggle with the issues above to the point I will now attempt something I've never done with over 140 GOG games to my credit, request a refund. This game turned out to be a disappointment I did not see coming.

Cyberpunk 2077 reaches for the stars and for the most part delivers on its promises. As incredible as the game is, I recommend that people give CD Projekt Red a few more weeks to iron out some of the more glaring bugs before jumping in. Cyberpunk 2077 is a dream and will only get better with time.