Most of the technical Problems are gone. I played on 1.0 and now on 1.6! The patches made a difference. BUT the Story, Characters and the design were awesome from the beginning!
I was sure CP77 would absolutely blow me away, and in a way it did.
A game that had been so hyped by the PR departments and then had half the stuff that was presented to fans cut out of the game.
A game that was so buggy that on day one I had to stop after not even an hour, because a bug directly after the prologue stopped me from continuing the game. A game that was so buggy it was removed from the Playstation store, a game that was basically unplayable on Last Gen consoles, despite CDPR talking about how surprisingly well the game runs on them.
And it took so long to fix the worst of it and the upcoming update that will finally actually implement some of what was initially promised, basically forces you to upgrade your hardware. It's insane.
This was badly done, released about 2 years too early, handled horribly by the company, and it simply doesn't deserve the high ratings it is getting.
It is an okay game now, but the whole story before that has to be taken into account, I can not just review the game as it is now, I have to also review the game as it was when I actually was waiting to finally play it. And just because you get your game running halfway stable and got all the systems in there working at a base level should not be worthy of four or five stars out of five.
The latest update for this game basically promised to restore the original vision of Night City. So did it deliver? Partially.
Cops are now much more lifelike - they patrol the streets and actively talk on comms with each other when you are being hunted. However, if you are, then more and more cops in patrol cars get spawned. It's just that unlike in 1.6, where they simply spawned from thin air, they ride a car. Max bounty summons Max-Tac. Not exactly an earth-shattering difference, but makes the game better, imho.
The new content in 2.0 and Phantom Liberty itself is very good.
New perk trees are mostly fun and well thought-out. They actually change the gameplay instead of "+X% to a random stat".
So why the 3 stars? Well, there are some obvious and rather disappointing game design changes and issues.
First of all, despite all that shiny new perk tree, 2.0 moved the game more towards looter shooter style of gameplay rather than an RPG. There are forced combat sequences in the new content, and bullet sponge bosses, so pure stealth gameplay is being punished (you are encouraged to combine it with something else).
Then there's the atrocious level scaling. CP2077 got the Oblivion treatment for some reason. After a certain level, you will get tons of legendary gear from ordinary enemies, breaking immersion and making crafting very superficial (why craft a purple weapon when the same weapon but in orange category will drop from ordinary chooms in the next ~3 hours of gameplay...) - it now exist to only save you money with hack crafting and upgrading cyberware.
Next are the disappointing boss fight mechanics. Bosses used to be like ordinary gonks, just stronger. Now, they have "weak points" and you must hit those, otherwise you have no chance. Bosses are insane bullet sponges and especially hacking / stealth builds will have a lot of problems with them.
All in all, I would lying if I said I'm not enjoying 2.0, but I miss some things from previous Cyberpunk.
I love this game, BUT...
What worth the game if there are plenty of bugs in it, right? I couldn't finish the story because there is a serious bug that prevents me to proceed with a main ending quest. That's why I only give 3 stars and I hope they fix the mentioned error, which I have already reported to the support team.
It is my favourite game.
Story, graphics and immersion are top.
I only played it a long time after all issues were fixed, so perhaps that is why I like it so much as well, as it currently stands the game is amazing.