I tried not to buy into the hype. Despite owning The Witcher 1-3 I thought they were just OK. I was super stoked on the setting and was hoping to play as a nethacking stealth sniper. Game starts... one mission in your backstory... cutscene... boom you're in Night City. Spent about 16 hours running around doing side missions and trying things out. Minor bugs at that point, missing AI features, rudimentary combat. Stealth is tedious to the point where it's literally easier to run in and hit everyone with a bat. There's no benefit to going stealth, to finishing without aggroing, to trying a no-kill run. If you're spotted everyone is instantly alerted (which kinda makes sense if everyone's networked) but it shouldn't work that way if I'm hacking everyone, trying to take them off the network or blind them. Melee is super basic. Shooting is ok, guns feel fine but don't really feel any different from one another. Every car and motorcycle basically handles the same and that's not great. Then I tried to get back to the story... meaning I was 3 or 4 missions in? Stuck for two days trying to do the Maelstrom mission. If it wasn't a crash to desktop it was enemies getting stuck in the wall and still shooting us or allies walking in front of me and blocking all my shots. Finally get through that mission without a crash I finished it off without doing the bonus objective. There was no consequence to any of the choices I made leading up to or in that mission. Save it because crashes. Go back to my apartment to sort gear and get rid of stuff - which is tedious as hell. You get SO MANY slightly different versions of the exact same guns and the sorting options they have don't do very well of making it any less tedious. Thought I'd be really into crafting but you get minor upgrades so fast it's pointless. Walk out of my apartment where the cops who've been detaining for 2 days insta aggro and end me. I lose all the time I took sorting my inventory. I'm over it.
