Cyberpunk 2077

So, where to begin. My credentials: approaching 40, played a lot of pen&paper Cyberpunk 2020 back in the day, even wrote some content for the unofficial portal (Night City Limits ahoy). I've put in 110+ hours to date, on my second playthrough. The good: - Art and design is amazing. Even after 50 hours I could discover a small street or a location that awed me. Simply beautifully handcrafted, you can see the level designers poured their hearts into this. That also includes vehicles. - Story is ok. You can spot that the writers read William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy and a couple of other things. And of course respect for Maximum Mike's material. The ok-ish: - Gameplay loop is reminding me of Deus Ex from 2011 or, even farther, to Vampire Bloodlines. There are some nice ideas here and there (like the automatic leaning system... however not really a new invention, just copied from somewhere else, like Viet Cong). They put more emphasis on shooting and violence rather than stealth. It works, but the skilltree design is messy. The main problem is that it's very derivative. - Quest system. Now I have a problem with this one. I like the "buffet" narrative where you can build your experience from the parts you want and not just be shoehorned into completing all quests until you reach the last one. However, the writing is all over the place. There are some very well designed quests with multiple outcomes. One excellent example is the "repentant murderer gangoon" quest on the road to redemption. No spoilers, but I had a real moral quandary with this one and it left a very lasting impact on me. On the other hand, there are some quests that seem to be simple go-kill-fetches. I like the general idea, but the execution is a messy. The bad: - State of release and removed content. I will not comment on this, but man, if you guys at CDPR stop don't take this to get rid of your know-it-all arrogant attitude then you don't deserve to have a company.

Advertised as the being the next evolution of open world games, Cyberpunks biggest failure isn't its lack of polish or abundance of bugs, but the fact that it lacks ANY innovation to the open world genre at all. Most quests, main and side, only offer the choice of stealth or guns blazing. The option to kill or spare an enemy isn't revolutionary, nor does it provide anything to the genre. For example, mgs has been in this style for decades. What Cyberpunk promised was multiple paths and options in a story, however, these paths that were implemented add nothing to the gameplay. Choices are completely meaningless or not existing at all, examples being the option to help your friends or not, which appear at the end of the quest line so they don't effect the rest of the story. When all meaningful choices don't branch the game in any way, the game becomes stale. Every mission plays the exact same, and the choices mean nothing considering the fact I just mentioned. Terrible, the worst games I've played in 2020. Without hype, without any advertisement, this would still be a generic bad game, and one that would've worked better with a linear environment.

The game has so much potential that the disappointment is huge for me. Writing this after my first playthrough a month after release, there are still so many bugs it ain't funny. Few of them were game-breaking for me; the most serious could be solved after loading old saves and playing a short stretch again a couple times until the game worked as intended. The countless other bugs however keep reminding you that you're playing a video game, and a flawed one at that. The little bugs and glitches really kill the immersion. Bugs aside, the game wants to be many things and fails at most of them. First person shooter? Other gtames are better. RPG? The skill tree, implants and loot systems are all kind of lacking and have been one better by other games, including CDPR's own Witcher 3. Open world game? Night City is big and crowded and still feels somewhat empty, despite the tons of side missions you can do. Stealth game? Despite the fact that the game forces you to play that way again and again, the mechanics simply suck. What we have is a really flawed, bug-ridden, badly performing piece of software that would have needed another 6-12n months to adequately finish. I pre-ordered the game back in 2019. Everybody was hyped, so was I. Until the release was delayed twice, and when the game came out in December '20, I didn't really care anymore. For me, CD Projekt Red has lost a lof of credibility and they have a lot of work ahead of them to regain trust. As it stands right now, the game is a 7/10 for me, and that's being generous considering the sheer amount of bugs and design flaws it has. I wanna play it again, however. Maybe I'll have forgotten about the story near the end of 2021 and the bugs have been fixed by then.

Dont want to beat a dead horse here - everything i would say has already been said and written hundreds of thousands of times. On high end PC without bugs etc game is at best 6/10. Everything else is one of the biggest deceptions in gaming history - majority of the advertised features is just not here and obviously was never intended to be here according Adam B. It is a very beautifuil looter shooter with zero actual replayability due to dead world, reactivity, almost complete absence of any actual decission making having impactful C&C etc. Everything the game offers has been done times better in multiple other titles - it really shows that W3 developers are long gone. It is not a bad game, it is not good game - it is just a play one time and forget it title. The recent revelations behind the scenes as well as the unbelievable level of arrogance combined with total denial of the game problems demonstrated by CDPR de-factor leaders (Adam & Marcin) respectively in their separate responses has made me decide that i will never ever again pre-order anything from anyone. I am also considering stopping any financial support for CDPR considering the above (like buying at GoG which i have been doing since GoG`s inception). Through my good ~32 years - i havent been so disappointed in a game since Diablo 3 (which i waited nearly as long as CB77).

Sadly as many modern game, Cyberpunk 2077 was also build for console and it's shows. I was never a real fan of QTE but I kinda liked the one in the mass effect franchise, not mandatory but a nice addition with a bit of time (depending of the action and point in paragon/renegade) and a keyboard or mouse key for it. In Cyberpunk you buy the PC version because you want to play this FPS/RPG with real controls and you cannot remap most of the keys. Some controls look totally useless between F/E/R for actions when they could have merged most of them like in Deus Ex. With that much keys you're still unable to pick some items if a NPC is close for example as it overlaps. The weapon wheel is really bad for mouse and shows the gamepad spirit in the controls that make this game a hassle to play. When some controls are over multiplied they managed to put the rolls/dodge/slide on double tap. Lights are nice and all, but some texture on building right in front of you loads after those in the background : what the hell is that the Saint row 2 PC port? AI is so sooo bad, I don't have the flying cars but some guys can somehow aggro you from the opposite side of the city map (if you put the subtitles on you can see them), making stealth weird as some dudes can spot you even if you never were seen by other or cameras and hide the bodies and sometimes you can just run, dance, say hello they just don't react at all even if you reload. There is no quickload key too which is actually a bother since you spend more time loading to try to correct bugs than for an error you did. For example cannot grab to stealth disable a sitting dude, so you have to jump on the chair w/o him noticing... Weirdly enough, if not for the lightning bug (due to not using the very last MESA) the game seems to run better on linux than windows. Playing mostly rpg, I liked the idea of giving you directly a cache and a ride, and money drop is quite alright but still not enough : with that much bugs you want to respect