....after about 20 hours of play I have just become increasingly frustrated, irritated and frankly bored. I really wanted to love this game but too many things break my engagement: - Main party characters have too few interactions and lack personality - NPCs are one-dimensional resulting in no emotional attachment - Quests are typically go there / kill or fetch that - Quest tracker is poorly implemeted - Spells are under-powered compared to melee reducing efficacy of casters - Brewing system is novel but poorly implemented - Damage / Defence stats are unbalanced with characters hitting 100% at reatively low levels - Graphics, especially combat effects, are underwhelming I could forgive some of the above but the nail in the coffin is having to wait between 70-100 seconds for a relatively small map to load, only to find out it's a one screen random enncounter map, and then wait another 70-100 seconds whilst the subsequent destination map loads. This is unacceptable considering the type of game this is. My machine isn't bleeding edge (Ryzen 9 3900X / 1080TI / 16GB / SSD's for OS and Games) but it manages to load AAA title game maps almost instantaneously. There is something seriously un-optimised about this game. I'll check back every few months and see what subsequent patches deliver, but for now I can't face staring at my screen endlessly waiting for the next location to load.
I am so pleased that I ignored the poor reviews! I am about 50 hours in and so far - apart from a single crash whilst driving through the desert - I have not experienced any major issues. Yes, (very) occasionally cars/people seem to pop in/out of scene, and I have seen a few NPC's prance about like puppets on strings, but this is rare and doesn't detract from the STUNNING graphics in Night City. I often drive long distances (rather than use the jump points) between missions just to see more of the city; which is - without exception - the most complete, realised city scape I have seen in a game. It feels like a real, breathing place, with thousands of people just going about their business. It's worth noting that NPC interactions/conversations are limited outside of specific quests - a little more AI would have been welcomed. I have not experienced any logic issues with any of the missions - except on one occasion when I needed to exit my own car and beat a psychotic taxi with my fists before the relevent end-scene was triggered :) Story so far is good, but - for me at least - not quite as emotionally fraught as the Witcher at it's best. Final bonus is - despite suffereing from motion sickness in many first-person games - I was fine with CP. Turning off motion blur, and turning on the little dot in the centre of the screen worked a treat. All in all - a very good game set in a breath-takingly realised city. For reference, I play at 2560x1440 with settings typically on Medium/High and maintain 59fps most of the time. My rig is a fairly old Crossfire VI / 1080TI / Ryzen 3900X, running Win 11.
