Cyberpunk 2077

Short: - No RPG - Linear story - Repetitive gameplay focuses only on defeating opponents - Crafting is cumbersome in extreme! - Cynical worldview only shows bad stuff to be "deep" + Looks stunning even w/o RTX + Great architecture/world, even if dead + Great immersion in first pv I played a lot and liked the time well enough. But then after the novelty wears off nothing much stays. It's definitively not an RPG. At least not in my book. The player character V is very rigidly planned out. I couldn't make him my own. You have to solve every problem by defeating opponents through use of weapons or hacking, that shuts them down. In almost no side quest is it possible to just talk or find other ways of solving the problem. It's almost always guns or hacking. A huge amount of content are the gigs or similar small challenges, where you basically work as a murderous police-officer cleaning up the city. For what purpose? I couldn't find out and hope it's not just for the gentrification of night city so big corpos can invest more. There are almost no branching storylines. The story and world are extremely cynical. There is no feeling of doing something "punk", something wild and serving a purpose for the good of other people around you. It's extremely individualistic. You only work for your interests and those close around you. Why does this matter? If you had the choice, this would be a nice way of RP, like in the old KOTOR games, where you could become an evil sith lord. But here everything feels like a neo-liberal self optimizing trip drenched in neon light. Punk is used here like in Business Punk, using radical egoistical means to rise above others. The starting choices are a joke too. They are over in under 1h. And then the first chapter starts, which is actually very good because it's very dense. At the fringes of the city/map there is nothing to do. Nothing to explore at all. No storys are starting there like they would in a normal open world rpg.

I only played CP2077 in may 2021, at this point most game-breaking bugs were polished out. CP2077 is a PC/console adaptation of the pen and paper game titled CP2020, which I actually played as a teenage boy. I'll make several comparisons to the tabletop, because CP 2077 is advertised as an RPG and makes claims to the same IP. The first noticeable thing in character creation and the prologue is the absence of character classes, which is also reflected by the combat-oriented trailers and screenshots. The original tabletop had 9 character classes, two of which were heavily combat-oriented. Well in CP 2077 most of what you do is combat. Speaking of combat it's your usual dopamine-driven looter shooter deal. Drops are RNG-generated, they're carbon copies of a few models of clothing and armament. Enemies, even common street thugs are bullet sponges. Gunplay is about dumping dozens of rounds into your enemies and spamming healing items. Tactics are of limited use, because they offer no means to quickly end an otherwise protracted gunfight. Inventory and the upgrade system are just bad. First of all, all items equipped count towards defense. You'll probably end up looking like a hobo or a pimp, because that dirty tracksuit or sleeveless that a thug dropped is better than your leather jacket and denims. The upgrade system is the same as in AC: Origins and Odyssey. Here's your item, you can slightly increase its stats by throwing money at it, or using up ressources and doing it yourself. Meanwhile there are countless shooters that allow deep customization of your firearms with parts and accessories. Character development is a hybrid of classic XP and passive leveling. You level your skills and get skill points to spend wherever you want (you can spend points into hacking by leveling up your pistol skill), which is a lazy cop-out, since most of your XP will come from kills. You can also add a point into a stat and a skill with each level of experience. Cheap and lazy.

This game really needed another 2 years of work before being released. The game is full of issues that detract from the experience and should have been identified by even the most casual and brief playthrough during testing. Some are quite gamebreaking while others are purely cosmetic. I also found the voice acting for Silverhand to be incredibly lacklustre, which was a shock given the name behind the voice.

A lot of the contents mentioned during the dev streams were removed. AI sucks, pointing a gun at someone who is inside the car does not trigger any response at all. Police suddenly spawns out of nowhere and for some reason does not use any vehicle. Car chase with shootouts are scripted, will have the same result whether you shoot or not. Hitting a traffic then rotating your camera to the point where the vehicle you've rammed can no longer be seen and rotating it back again magically repairs the dents in that vehicle and places it back in the road as if you've never rammed it. NPCs do not steer the steering wheel when steering. Customizations are limited compared to what was promised. Prologues does not matter, it is just a short 10 minute introduction and after that a rushed cinematic to make you care about someone who you are supposed to care for but since it is rushed, it is very hard to develop emotional attachment to said character. Character shadow movement looks like Woody from toy story. NPCs say the same thing over and over again. NPC mouths sometime doesn't move when talking to them. No water physics when you shoot or drive through them. Decisions barely make an impact on story except for some select few dialogue options. Children are like downscaled models of adults. No random encounters and many other immersion breaking bugs or features. The game promised immersion but feels like a half baked RPG. Would've understood it if the game was released 8 years ago but for a 2020 AAA game? Several other older games were able to do better except for its graphics. The only thing worth praising in the game is the graphics and the story but it is very hard to immerse yourself in the story when the game world is doing its best for you not to.

This is not an RPG. It's a mediocre action adventure. It's pretty shallow. There is no reason to explore the city beyond the places of the main story. It's on the verge of being outright boring. At patch level 1.23 I did not encounter severe bugs and glitches. The game can be summarised in 2 words: wasted potential.