Being lucky enough to have stable performance without any crashes or freezes I've still encountered a lot of technical issues. Plethora of immersion-breaking bugs like character rubber-banding while running or stealthing, not being able to pick up items, getting stuck behind doors that won't open, randomly dying because collided with world geometry, audio bugs are just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of these can be ironed out with patches, but some features are just poorly implemented. Lifepaths do much to immerse you in the world but after 30 minutes and a abrupt cuscene showing what I assume is cut content they all converge on the same spot in the story. There is no point to police or wanted levels, no reputation system or faction related tasks/vendors which makes interaction with various gangs in the city boil down to simple firefights. Loot system is a mess nad inventory managment unwieldy. No changing your character appearence post-creation; no different hairstlyes, tattoos, visible cyberware (apart from story related ones) or any sort of transmog leaving your character a walking fashion disaster. And this in a game whose tabletop version had a dedicated Wardrobe and Style skill. There are 15-20 year old open world games that handled this better. Despite all that i listed above, much of my 50 hours spent in-game were spent enjoying things that were fun. Characters and voice-acting are top-notch, storyline immersive, music amazing, and graphically it's gonna be a benchmark for all future GPUs. There's a potential for a great game here, it's just a shame it's marred by so many issues that they can't be summarized in 2000-character review. Developers didn't do it any favors with obscuring facts, shady review practices and embargos and what in my opinion seems like a profoud lack of direction; like they simply didn't know what they wanted to make and had no time to implement it all. CD Projekt Red has their work cut out for them and a lot of redeeming to do.
