There is nothing about this game that you haven't seen done better elsewhere and you have likely played arguably worse games that have had more interesting positive surprises than this one. "Exploring" this game rarely entails interesting surprises with mechanics, gameplay, or storytelling, and largely just consists of a long reveal of mechanics and plot points that you have seen time and time again. Character creation? You have few options to really do interesting things with your characters visually (or from a roleplaying perspective) and I'd argue games like Conan Exiles, which is a few tiers below this in scale and production cost, manage both of these facets far better than CP. The game is a very cohesive-but-standard mediocre open-world game from this generation and nothing about it truly stands-out apart from its marketing. I'm sure had this been released by Ubisoft of Bethesda, it would've been another name on a release schedule, but as a follow-up to The Witcher 3, it's hard to justify the end results. I never feel like I'm pulling an interesting thread that's leading me down paths I never expected and I'm almost always crossing items off a list or doing something that feels inconsequential and tedious. Even without bugs, I wasn't graphically amazed and this game ultimately illustrates how wrong companies go with "bigger is better" instead of leveraging resources in a focused and compelling way. The fact that games like Control or Death Stranding radically impacted me, despite being made by exponentially smaller teams with smaller budgets, but this game fails to elicit even pretty low-level praise is probably a pretty good testament to the fact that CDPR's desire to scale upward was poorly conceived at the cost of a brand I previously admired. Yeah, the Witcher 3 was big and ever-expanding, but I still felt like there was a guiding focus that made it feel impactful without unnecessary sprawl.
