Cyberpunk 2077

Cannot shake the feeling that this was supposed to be a Witcher3-like RPG with complex characters and story with plenty impactful player decisions, but somewhere 2/3 into its developement some dirty corp-rat decided to gut it, and turn it into a looter shooter with bare bones of the original story. Player decisions are basically non-existent, conversation "options" sometimes do give you additional information, but generally lead to the same or very similar results. The city is huge, but feels empty because lot of the content is anonymous. You have no connection to fixers, no complex interactions with gangs... But the most painful thing is, that i, as a seasoned Dungeon Master can see, where the story hooks were and roughly where there were supposed to lead, and have decent enough feel for the tons of complexity that OBVIOUSLY nede on the floor of the cutting room. This game is a dessicated corpse of an RPG with chrome ripped out of it. This gameis like a digital imprint of a personality created by the Soulkiller. The data is there, but the soul is gone. It is a decent enough game, by today's poor standards, but if you really needs that cyberpunk itch scratched, do yourself a favour and play somethign from the Shadowrun franchise. As for RPGs... the old VtM:Bloodlines were better at being an RPG than this is. In other words: Welcome to the ranks of the Corp-rats, CDPR! You are up there with EA and all the other corp-rat trash! All it cost, was your soul.

Visually game is great even breathtaking when the bugs don't bork that immersion. Gameplay is fun but the bugs hamper some of it. Not being able to rebind keys on pc is a big no no and for love of all that is good please make a walk button. Fps lag even on a high end pc is noticable which highlights the unpolished nature of the game that was just rushed too early to meet a deadline set by corpos. But the biggest sin for me is the currently the 8mb limit on save files. 8mb save file limit on a open world game with crafting and looting.... are you kidding me. 8mb file limit that can and has corrupted playtroughts over 40-60 hour long because of the limit. This needs immediate attention if they indeed will someday plan to make expansions because this limit will make the game unplayable at some point because the save file size will only increase even without crafting and minimal looting.

The idea of this game is great; however, it has been ruined by poor design choices and bugs. I want to like this game, I really do, but every time I start it up I immediately run into an immersion breaking bug, today I couldn't park my car next to other cars, in a car park, as the game has invisible walls and chose to put one just in front of the car parking space, or when I couldn’t complete a quest as the NPC I was supposed to search glitched out and the quest couldn’t end. There are also some extremely questionable design choices, skipping the entire first part of the story and instead showing us a cutscene? Instead I just accept the relationships in the game instead of building them. Having navigation on a minimap that does not dynamically zoom so I miss every turn when the main character has AR built into her eye, the awful driving physics which makes the constant U-turns an absolute chore. there are too many more to mention but those are my personal highlights. The worst thing about this game though is that this amazing, beautiful city that CDPR have created is utterly lifeless, by this I do not mean it lacks NPC, no there are plenty of them, but they are completely useless in terms of AI none of them seem to be going anywhere, there is no interesting dialogue, the same people are stood at the exit of my apartment building every time I leave. The traffic AI will just sit behind an obstacle indefinitely, no horn beeps, no attempt to navigate around. The police will just shoot you for the anything but will not chase you at all, so just run to a different street and wait 5 seconds and you are fine. CPU and GPU usage never go above 60% and 40% respectively, this is on max, running a Ryzen 3600 and a gtx1080. this game should be stretching the limits of that graphics card at these setting but its barely even breaking a sweat which means there is performance being left on the table. I hope these bugs are not masking a bad game and i hope they can be fixed soon.

I have now completed most side missions, and the main campaign which gave me about 30 hours. So here are my thoughts, and if you think i'm going to give CDPR a free pass think again: The good: - Night City is an amazing space, that thank god gets rid of the Ubisoft approach of "bigger is better". It does not focus of square miles and a huge map. But instead a very dense world with amazing design that is so well connected. Its - Very good side missions, that are NOT boring Ubisoft busy work that we have become used to. But some of them are kinda phoned in. - The graphics can sometimes look truly amazing - Story can be really good, with some really good characters. The bad: - The games optimization is beyond awful. It really has to be seen to be believed. I have really good hardware and could not get a steady 60 FPS without turning alot of stuff down to high and medium. - The graphics can sometimes look really awful. With flat lightning, and sometimes the lightning is just totally over exposed, glaring you with lens flares and bloom. - There are just far too many characters. Many of which just propel you from one place to the next, and only appear for 5 minutes. - the game is SOOO buggy! I cant remember playing something this buggy. T poses, Graphics going FUBAR, stuck in place, quests i could not progress in forcing me to reload or restart the game, crashes, clipping, objects spawning upside down, AI i could go on and on. The final mission for me was ruined by so many bugs, and i kid you not, i had to reload 10+ times. - Terrible AI, really ruins alot the cool encounters - The economy tuning is so bad. Things are FAR too expensive and you earn so little. By the end i could barely afford alot the cars, implants etc. - Systems like crafting, and quick hacking is just kind of pointless. You can get items that are better than what you can craft, very quickly, and hacking is just too cumbersome and slow. It was much quicker and more fun to just shoot.

What a disappointment. Even on PC, this game failed to deliver. This whole "release now, fix later" bullshit practice needs to end.