Cyberpunk 2077 has an interesting main story and some beautiful moments of immersive storytelling, but it is not the incredible, shoot-for-moon next level RPG with complex mechanics that was advertised. Also for starters, V is not an outlaw, you mostly get paid by the police. What was sold instead of an RPG is a subpar action-adventure open world game filled with a lot of pointless RPG elements, from the crafting, to the leveling system and the insane amount of items you can loot. It fails at being an RPG because choices don't matter, levels don't matter and your gear doesn't really. It also fails at being a GTA clone because it doesn't even offer 1/10th of the diverse activities, jobs, minigames that make Rockstar's cities alive and amazing to cruise through. Your Lifepath doesn't matter except for your 20mn prologue and some dialogue options in the early main quest but it doesn't impact side quests or your possible endings. Also, your background doesn't carry over and V is essentially the same character after the in-game trailer of the all the cool stuff you do for 6 months with your best friend Jackie (who you don't get to play with much). You can blow up things, buy many cars, kill criminals, and follow the main story. What you can't do is buy new condos, tune your car, choose them in stores, play minigames, enjoy cinematics or dialogues in most side quests, see yourself in 3rd person cinematics, pleasantly feel immersed thanks to animations at the ripperdoc or in any shops, you can't interact with NPCs, the police system is terribly implemented and the overall AI sucks. Also the driving is bad. Also, the combat is broken. All in all, sure, the environment is beautiful to look at but it's devoided of the care and attention to detail that made the Witcher III so great. It is a shame that Cyberpunk 2077 is just a cheap shell of what it intended to be because the writing is good and it could have been a better game, had it been handled differently.
This game is the best western open-world RPG ever made - Period. What makes the Witcher 3 so incredibly is I think, the way it pushes forward in terms of storytelling and implements it in every other aspect of the game and everywhere in its universe, from the side quests to the persistance of the world that is the most radiant and lively virtual environment I've ever seen. There is a post-witcher 3 era, and everyone who played the game can tell, this just toped the standards and blew the ceiling. I fear I'll be disappointed until Cyberpunk 2077 comes out because I don't know if other studios can match such a masterpiece.
