@ry_ry: Not joking. Hmm.. I've heard of this movie but never seen it before. I'll add it to the list.

That being said.. That's an old movie. If they did a Cyberpunk 2077 movie these days, they could sure as hell make everything look like the game but even better with all the crazy CGI stuff plus a lot of awesome costume work. Massive, beautiful, colorful city.

Gave it another few hours, it feels like I'm re-experiencing GTA III all over again except with the knowledge of everything that came after. There are so many little things CDPR overlooked here regardless of how the game runs, things that were solved as far back as GTA V when this thing was formally announced. It doesn't help, though, that the game on PS4 looks so much like Perfect Dark I keep wondering what this game would've been like if it were built in discreet missions rather than an attempt to be generation defining.

This is such a unique experience for me that I'm not especially mad at myself for owning it right now, but if I played more games in a year or were unable to throw an academic's hat on before booting Cyberpunk I'd be dropping it pretty hard right now. I suppose it's pretty clear where this game is at now though so this is probably my last check-in unless I see some truly wild stuff.

Honestly, the review of Cyberpunk by Gmanlives is the best reflection of my experience with the game. I agree with him in pretty much every aspect, although I think I have enjoyed the combat a slight bit more than he did. I'm about 24 hours in and I think about a third of the way through the story, and I have been really enjoying my time with it. I'm on a 2060 super at 1440p and have my fps hovering between around 45-70, with occasional dips to 30 (Jig-Jig street brings my computer to its knees). I've also been fortunate in that I haven't experienced any game breaking bugs or hard crashes. I've only gotten the silly visual glitches and occasional physics freak out. Visually, I think it is stunning, but with that said, I understand the complaints about the really simple pedestrian AI. I suppose if you came in looking for a GTA experience, it would be disappointing, but I honestly don't know if it would even be technically possible to have this dense of a population with any kind of robust AI. For me, I prefer the dense façade of a packed, bustling metropolis to a more sparse sandbox. People have also been complaining about the lack of choice, but I just think it's well obfuscated and isn't blatantly shoved in your face when your story is branching, which I personally prefer.

I don't know. CD Projekt definitely deserves the criticism for its shady practices, but I also think that criticism is leading to people being unduly critical of the game itself. At the end of the day, I think this is a larger, better playing, and all around more entertaining take on modern Deus Ex with a bit of Elder Scrolls thrown in, and if any of that sounds appealing to you and you have a PC that can play it, I think Cyberpunk is a fantastic game that will likely be in the running for my favorite game of the year. I just need to see how the story plays out.

I'm 23 hours in and after some initial reservations I have to say that I really, really like it. Solid 8/10 so far from a gameplay and story perspective (I'm not all too far in yet, since I've done a ton of side stuff, but I really don't get why people complain about the story so much).

I wish the guns felt a bit more varied, the driving felt better (boy do those cars feel heavy) and the difficutly didn't feel all over the place, but that's just about it with my complaints.

Haven't hit any serious bugs yet either (playing on PS5), just one random enemy goon doing a T-pose and, one quest being stuck for a while (which got solved with a quick reload) and a cutscene where a character had a gun stuck to his face (looked like something out of Persona 3). Let's hope it keeps like this.

Overall it feels like a different and somewhat more modern take on Deus Ex - which is what I expected this to be (I'll never understand why this is still getting compared to fucking GTA, just because you can steal and drive cars?).

I'm really not liking all the general discourse on this right now, which comes down to shitting on every minor problem in the game (not bug related - the bugs are understandably frustrating) and shitting on CDPR without end. I can't tell you how many "Cyberdunk, hur hur" memes I've seen in the last couple days. It's duumb. And, yes, it sucks that it's this buggy for mostly everyone and that the old console versions are bad, but that alone shouldn't completely suck the life out of this (and CDPR).

@sessh: I'm really not liking all the general discourse on this right now, which comes down to shitting on every minor problem in the game (not bug related - the bugs are understandably frustrating) and shitting on CDPR without end. I can't tell you how many "Cyberdunk, hur hur" memes I've seen in the last couple days. It's duumb. And, yes, it sucks that it's this buggy for mostly everyone and that the old console versions are bad, but that alone shouldn't completely suck the life out of this (and CDPR).

This has really been getting my goat. The Cyberpunkgame subreddit, in particular, has just devolved into a massive nitpicking circlejerk that absolutely infuriates me. Although, this honestly seems to be the case with any attempt at discourse online anymore, it's just particularly true with games. It seems people just really get off to the schadenfreude of seeing something burn.

I mean, they outright obfuscated the truth about the console versions, which is definitely something worth being upset about and definitely not just something like they want to watch CDPR burn. Hell, this was a company that had so much good will that people started harassment campaigns to reviewers that gave it less than a 9.

@sethmode: That's not what I was referring to. As I said, criticisms of the company and its practices are wholly justified. If you were to go to the cyberpunkgame subreddit, you would see that one of the top posts today was a thread on how the game doesn't actually change time when you choose to wait, but instead only moves the position of the sun in the sky. Absurd, miniscule shit like that is what I'm referring to when I talk about the rubberneckers just excited to watch something crash and burn.

@jacksmedulla: Absurd to you (and me, honestly), but a lot of people bought into a lot of the hype with that game, for good or for ill, and CDPR was directly behind a lot of that. Many people feel they were duped for many reasons...I guess I just don't see this as people being mad for the sake of piling on, and on top of it all, I find it hard to be sympathetic toward CDPR at all since they're in this mess via their own doing.

Stadium Love mission has a full on bug for me:

During the shooting competition, the second station does not allow me to draw my gun. Thus negating all the points one could potentially score there.

Also I've turned off subtitles and if I load into a save where someone is talking, their line will be forever on my screen. I have to make a new save while no one is speaking and load that to clear the screen.

I gotta say I am maybe 15 hours in and completely loving it. The gameplay has been fun as hell and the story/characters are amazing. But most of all this fucking city is so cool. I love that the game is in first person. It just gives so much scale to things. Walking around the downtown area around the huge buildings and looking up is like nothing else I've felt in games. There is so much density in this game it is ridiculous and the design of all the different parts of the city is top notch.

With that said I am on the PC version with a high end rig. The streets are packed, the game run smooth, and everything looks incredible. I have only had a few bad bugs, and several negligible ones. TBH it hasn't negatively impacted me much at all.

I just hope everyone on console can get a similar experience in the near future.

As a final thought it kind of bums me out how down on the game Giant Bomb has been. I am cool with them trashing it to no end for the bugs, but when they ignore all that and talk about the base game they act like it is just some run of the mill open world game. It is really so much more impressive than that. Do they really think this is on par with series like Watch Dogs or Assassins Creed? Because that is the vibe I get. I feel like I live in a different universe sometimes when they talk about games. Oh well.

Stuff like that should be absurd to anyone and if people believe big-scale marketing campaigns without even thinking about it, that's on them also. Just in general the marketing of every single game/movie (or just company) etc. promises it to be the best thing ever made - that's just how it is. I'm not saying this is a good thing, far from it, but it's how this shit works, thus you can't blame CDPR's marketing department for doing their jobs.

Not handing out console copies to the press sucks, I agree. These practices need to change, but that's also something that's not unique to this case but something a lot of other devs have done in the past.

I'm not mindlessly trying to say "it's not CDPRs fault", because that wouldn't be true. But everything happening now is just partially their fault - that's a fact. Not one dev team in the world wants to ship a broken game, but business realties, investors etc. don't care about this, and often force devs to do just that. I've also read an interesting comment by some other dev (can't remember the name), mentioning that testing for bugs while working from home would be extremely hard, so the entire covid thing should also have proven a huge problem here.

Minor bugs/jank is to be expected, in big open world games especially, and people making arguments like "Oh god, I couldn't get out of the water at every single point where I think it should work, this game is fucking terrible", just sound as if they've never played a video game before.

Again, it's fine (and encouraged even) to complain about valid points, like the hundreds of bugs and the performance, but damning the game for completely minor stuff is just dumb. Especially since I'm sure loads of people aren't doing this because they are actually frustrated or whatever, but because they just want to shit on something (doubly so, since this game was hyped to high heaven before). And, yes, it's the internet in 2020, but come on. All I want is fair discourse on this game, that's not the best thing ever, but also not the worst.

So sitting now at the point of no return with a huge chunk of side stuff done and a sizable chunk remaining that I'll probably clean up still.

I remain pretty damn positive on the game overall. Though mostly I really like the writing and missions more than the moment to moment gameplay. The combat is Fine but also it's definitely one of those games where I clicked in the last point of a build and basically solved all future encounters.

I never saw any fucked up bugs, or funny bugs. All I get are this UI element is now on my screen forever unless I quicksave/load.

It's a real bummer that everything around the game is so fucked because I think it's just very strong and that's gonna get (rightfully) buried by self sabotage.

I think I hit a bug where most crafting specs disappear from the stores. Nice since I put 17 points on the technical just to be able to craft stuff...

Most annoying bug so far is the one where you get of from your bike and have to hit pause/menu in order to walk again at normal speed (happens 100% after unmount). Similar one is where you have to talk twice to shop keeper in order to get the the shop menu.

There is not a session where something doesn't bugs out, usually it is small things, sometimes you need to reload an autosave. That said it hasn't crashed into during 50 hours of gameplay.

Most useful one was in the Arasaka infiltration with Goro. AI bugged completely and I was able to just walk trough the compound without anybody reacting to anything.

@charlie_victor_bravo: I also got the bike thing constantly, I find that it also clears up if I aim down sights. A little faster than opening the menu.

@hug_niceman: Whenever I have a subtitle just stay on screen, if I pause and turn the subtitles on and off again, it'll go away. I'm playing the Xbox One version on Series X, though, so I'm not sure if it'll work on your platform.

Visual bugs like that aside, I'm honestly having a pretty great time with it. I think I've been lucky though in that I haven't hit any major bugs. I do think the story and particularly the sidequests get much better after Act 1, so I'm kinda bummed they don't give you more interesting side stuff from the get-go.

So I ended slowing down my playtime with this game tremendously after seeing Jeff talk about how the ending borked itself and ruined any sort of immersion and dramatic effect.

I'm still enjoying the main story missions and have mostly run into minor visual bugs nothing game breaking but the spector that a dramatic moment could possibly be undermined by a bad visual bug or scripting issue is giving me pause. I don't need my first experience with this game be ruined by something that may be fixed in the next 2-3 months.

I've now put a little more time into the game and I have to say that after the end of Act I I am even more baffled by the decision they made with the prologues. I also feel more and more like I wish that they hadn't gotten the idea to let you "create" and customize your character. Dialogue responses just don't matter so I very much feel like I am just playing the V. that they want me to (who is an asshole) and yet because they want to allow customization they didn't really create a specific character like they did with Geralt. It's kind of the worst of both worlds, where you get the genericness of a created character mixed with the lack of meaningful choice in a specific character they created.

There are other systems that I just don't understand. Like missions give a ranking for dangerousness but one side gig marked as "dangerous" in my journal literally just involved finding a car and driving it back to a garage with no combat while another marked as only moderately risky involved a shootout with half a dozen cyber gang members. Both paid similar amounts too, about $1,000, and while that seems find for "find and return this car" it seems pretty low for a job that involves killing a bunch of armed people.

The shootout job also had major ludonarrative dissonance where you're rescuing this doctor and she wants you to help her save a life even though the person is a bad guy, because she's a doctor damn it, but no mention of the fact that on the way out you pass by half a dozen fresh corpses. I know that this is a video game and video games are gonna video game but this stuff is always immersion breaking for me.

Overall I think the game is...good. It has good parts and bad parts, positives and negatives. I think the storytelling is all over the place and I'm a little confused why people in this thread are singing its praises, but it's also far from the worst I've ever seen in a big budget video game.

I think in the end Cyberpunk 2077 is a victim of its own hype. It's just a game. One with more ambition than most and more technical problems than most, but underneath everything just another first person RPG. That's not a terrible thing to be, and it has a lot of good elements, but I don't think it will be remembered as an industry milestone the way The Witcher 3 is.

@bigsocrates: I was just thinking today how no one uses the term ludonarrative dissonance anymore and have instead switched over to “it doesn’t have anything to say...” instead.

Near as I can tell the danger rating is strictly based on level relative to you. So rescuing the doctor was moderate because no matter how many guys were there they were all of comparable level to you.

Whereas the other job, even if it only had a couple of sentries out somewhere, could be rated high danger if any of them are above you.

@humanity: I think it's used less because people just don't find it interesting anymore. The "it doesn't matter if Nathan Drake kills a few hundred guys he's still my quippy fun friend lighten up" crowd seems to have mostly won the 'debate.' Which is a shame because I don't even think the ludonarrative dissonance people were saying it's always bad, just that it's a thing and that maybe there are ways to design video games in more interesting ways. And there have been attempts, especially in the indie world, but it's still something I think about whenever I'm playing a game. Watch Dogs 2 was the biggest offender for me in recent memory. That game is pitched as "fun hacker hijinx" in tone but unless you're incredibly careful you're going to kill a lot of people, and even if you are super careful to play nonlethal you're going to hurt a lot more. At least Cyberpunk 2077 is just like "this is a a bad place and people get killed" and doesn't even pitch you as necessarily a good person.

@efesell: I think this is correct, but the mission I'm talking about did not have any sentries out anywhere. It was very much "just go get this unguarded car and drive it back." It's part of a quest chain that might have some combat in some other part of the chain (there's a bunch of different linked but discrete quests) so that might be why it's marked as dangerous in the journal, or it might just be based on the level they expect you to be when you unlock it, but I wish they would just go with a "recommended level" marker instead of this vague and silly system.

There are just a lot of odd choices like that in this game. It feels unpolished not just from a technical standpoint but from a UI standpoint. Which is weird because it's also this huge world with a ton of content and clearly had a very substantial budget, but you're left wondering whether anyone actually playtested. The fact is they were probably just trying to crush as many bugs as they can during that final crunch and couldn't worry about all the UI issues.

I'm nearly finished with Act II and I'm pretty lukewarm on the game. The main and side missions are all generally pretty polished, but the pacing is really strange; you'll sometimes have like 4 missions in a row that are just chatting with people or slowly driving from one place to another. I get that they want to build up anticipation for the combat set-piece missions, but in a game where the only real way to interact with anything is by shooting or punching it, it's not great to sit down for a play session and not accomplish anything but a bunch of chores so that the game can deliver its narrative.

The story is... fine? It's a big, splashy, AAA action game plot with very good voice-acting and lip-syncing. It's very much bogged down in gang stuff, small-time merc biz, and sex work, though, which means you don't ever get to see the other parts of the Cyberpunk setting, which is really disappointing. Corporations come off as extremely generic baddies, and you never really get to see things from their perspective (short of the maybe half-hour intro you get if you pick the Corpo lifepath). I also found the game's attempts to deal with "heavy" subject matter (snuff films, human trafficking, sexual assault) pretty tasteless; it felt a lot like the devs shoehorning it into what's otherwise a pretty juvenile futuristic power fantasy and it was pretty tonally jarring to me. They didn't handle it badly enough to be offensive, I guess, but I really just thought it was a poor choice of content to put into the game. Also, this might be a hot take, but Keanu is not very good in this. He's fine being snarky and shitty, but whenever he tries to do angry, it's pretty rough.

The biggest issue is just how damned linear the game is. I'm nearly done with the story, and there have been a grand total of two missions where your choices actually change the course of events, and one of them was shown off in its entirety in an E3 demo! Your dialogue choices generally boil down to "Yes," "Enthusiastic Yes," "Reluctant Yes," or "[STAT CHECK] Yes." This game is not even a little bit an RPG; it's a linear looter shooter where you get to choose how snarky you're going to be. To me, this is the biggest misrepresentation CDPR is guilty of, and they are 100% responsible for players having the expectations they did. Deus Ex, this is not.

In terms of gameplay, boy, do I have a lot of gripes. There are only about 30 unique weapons in the entire game, but you're constantly picking up different permutations of them that have different DPS. Every couple of minutes you have to swap out your gun for another one that's functionally identical, but has slightly better numbers. It's like CDPR had heard someone describe a looter shooter to them, but had never seen one themselves and just created what they thought it was without understanding the point of it. Crafting is extremely unintuitive and requires you to break down weapons and items one-by-one using the atrocious inventory system. The shooting feels ok, but the game does a really shit job of maintaining any sort of coherence in terms of the strength of different enemies. Why the hell can I carve up heavily armored Corpo supersoldiers, but a bunch of gangbangers in wifebeaters and jeans can two-shot me and take no damage from my upgraded, explosive-tipped anti-materiel rifle? Especially when they look identical to some chumps up the street that die if I bump into them too hard?

It's extremely disappointing that CDPR spent so much time crafting such a beautiful open world and then fitted it with generic FPS missions and side-gigs that feel procedurally generated (but with a datapad with some throwaway conversation included to make it seem like it had a story!). I don't think there's any path for them to turn this game into what they promised, and even if they did make dramatic changes, I don't think I want to replay a fully linear, and at times boring, story again to see them. What a bummer.

@notkcots: Your gripes are legitimate but I think the "not an RPG" argument doesn't hold water. It very much is an RPG. You have a complex stats and equipment system with lots of player choices in how they build and outfit their character. You have a ton of conversations and dialog and lots of optional content including tons of sidequests. Mechanically it's very much based on the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG.

What you seem to be upset about is that the game doesn't feature meaningful choices or particularly deep branching quest lines (like Skyrim's Stormcloaks vs. Imperials stuff.) It's totally legitimate to want that stuff and wish it was in the game, but plenty of RPGs don't have anything like that.

It's not a looter shooter because you spend most of the game not looting and shooting. Mostly you are walking around in the city going from place to place, or talking to people, or doing crafting stuff. The amount of time actually spent in combat is pretty low even for an RPG, let alone a true looter shooter.

It's totally fine to wish that the game had meaningful choices. I'm right there with you in a lot of ways, but it's still an RPG in the Bethesda RPG tradition. It's just an RPG that's linear and lacks player choice.

I also agree with the criticisms that the game doesn't handle sensitive subject matter well. It feels like it's trying to be edgy and it just comes off as kind of exploitative.

And yeah Keanu's not great in this role. He's not the worst big time actor in a video game, and his likeness does add to Johnny Silverhand's mystique, but a lot of the linereadings are flat and the character is weirdly written against type for Keanu. He's written as sort of an angry violent self-righteous type instead of a laid back zen dude, and so a lot of the line readings don't really work.

I dunno I think Keanu has more hits than misses in this role. I do agree that when it's time for a fiery sermon it really falls flat but I kinda went along with it because Johnny is pretty fuckin' shit at that too he just thinks he's reinventing the wheel. You might say that's painting a target after the shot has already been taken but hey I thought it worked out.

What I do like a lot more is the quieter moments with him and especially the extremely strange variant of morality pet he ends up being when he comments on your side quests.

As an aside I really found myself enjoying all of the little additions to exposition. Riding along in a car or sitting down to have a drink with someone has a lot more character than what I think would normally be a phone call or walk and talk or what have you elsewhere.

@efesell: This is a great post and exactly how I feel about Keanu and Silverhand. I was kind of surprised to see people complaining about him. I am more positive on this game than most, but one part I thought would be liked by all would be the interlude and a lot of stuff after it.

@sethmode: I disliked the interlude and what came after, though not because of Keanu. Without getting into spoilers there were a lot of "fake interactive" sequences during that part of the game where you seem like you have control of what's happening but it's really kind of a cut scene or a quick time event. I don't like that kind of gameplay. Either give me control of the game or put me in a cut scene, but don't tell me I have control when I really don't.

Keanu's performance was fine during that part (and as I said it's not the worst performance by a celeb in a game ever by any stretch in general) but I found the whole fake interactive thing kind of a bummer because I think one of the best parts of the game is how it sticks to first person and leaves you in control during almost every part. I didn't love the writing during and after the interlude either. But I don't love the writing in this game generally. Almost everyone is a jerk, which is a legitimate artistic choice but makes dealing with most of the characters unpleasant, and V.'s characterization is all over the map. S/he is mostly a snarky jerk but can sometimes be surprisingly kind and insightful and I just have no bead on the character. Silverhand suffers from some of the same issues, which might be affecting Keanu's performance because it's hard to create a compelling character when they don't act consistently.

@bigsocrates: I generally like his stuff but some of it is as you say fairly inconsistent and I think if I had to guess it's because he isn't a trained VO actor. There is a reason why in animated movies whenever you get big name movie actors doing roles they're never as good as professional VO actors who do that sort of thing for a living and understand the complexities of voice intonation. Yesterday I was doing a very throwaway side quest where you fix a rollercoaster and then you ride it, with Johnny Silverhand naturally riding shotgun with you. While the voice actor for my female V was doing a pretty good job at going "ahhhh wooooo!" Keanu was like a very stilted "wow.." You can tell he understood the lines, understood the context but wasn't alble to put the power behind his voice to properly convey what it's like screaming at the top of your lungs while on a rollercoaster.

The game is full of these little quirks. When Keanu has to deliver a more low-key and nuanced line while resting on a milk crate or commenting on your latest actions it's good because he's good at the low key stuff. Whenever he has to be dynamic and bombastic I think it just doesn't come through at all and as a result ends up feeling robotic and very insincere.

That said I'm going through these story missions for Judy and the Arasaka guy and those have been largely pretty fun. I feel like I might have missed like an entire exposition dump or a cutscene because regarding that Arasaka guy.. I just never saw the scene or the dialog where they explain how he was thrown out of Arasaka? You see him storm into the penthouse, find Saburo dead and his son tells him he was poisoned and then they all leave in the elevator. Next thing you know he's picking you up at the garbage dump and helping you and I thought he's still with the corp at that point. When is the point where they tell you what happened to him after the penthouse? I definitely missed it.

@humanity: Sure. He's no Troynolan Bakernorth, which I expected, but some of the line reading just seem jarringly off.

To be fair to Keanu, it's pretty obvious that the VO recording for this game was done in multiple studios under varied conditions. There are times when a character is talking to me and the acoustics of where it was recorded are obviously different from line to line even though we're in one location. It's likely that they changed things and went back for additional recordings, so it's possible that in addition to the issue of not being a trained VO, he was reading lines out of context and in a different setting, which is really hard for anyone. It's also possible that some of what seems like performance inconsistency is also caused by just different recording situations.

Speaking of sound...a small thing that bugs me is that the radio plays when you're driving a motorcycle. I am 100% on board with people who think that the bikes drive much better than the cars in this game (it's actually fun to tool around Night City in first person on a bike, while it's legit horrible in a car) and I like the soundtrack, but especially given that your character doesn't have a motorcycle helmet...how can he possibly hear the radio when he's going like 150 KPH on a highway? It makes no sense. Now you can, of course, argue that with cybernetic implants this shouldn't be a problem, but then why can't he listen to the radio when he's off his bike? Lots of games have let you do this and this game definitely should. It's a tiny thing but I find it to be an odd choice. Also calling it "radio" is a little odd. Why isn't it just data streaming? We all drive around our cars listening to data streaming on our phones NOW. And why aren't there podcasts/Spotify equivalents? Why radio? Watch Dogs 2 had on demand audio and that was set in 2017 or whatever. Maybe it was just another system that's too much trouble to implement but it's weird in a world that's otherwise so detailed and mostly well thought through that they're using music tech that was out of date like 70 years before the game is set.

Another weird thing is how side missions are set up. They're question marks on your map and then when you walk past one you get a call and a fixer tells you "hey you're walking past a building, you should go up there and steal something for me." But they're totally unscaled to your level and the fixer is never like "you're in the area could you help me with X?" they just act like it's a random call. And sometimes they're asking you to do something you're completely underleveled for and telling you to essentially walk into a deadly ambush. It's very strange and jarring. Equally strange and jarring is how all these people keep texting you trying to sell you cars. They don't have Ebay or other car selling websites in 2077? You just text your pal V. and ask him to buy it? There are no car dealerships?

These are all pretty minor complaints in the grand scheme of things but I'm curious as to how many of them are intentional decisions, how many are just oversights, and how many were implemented due to lack of time/budget (I suspect that the radio thing is due to not having time/budget to produce a bunch of podcasts and license dozens of music tracks.)

Speaking of the radio, I was shocked the first time I went to change the station while driving and it both took control away from me and brought my car to a nearly complete stop before the radio station menu could actually load (PS4, to be clear). And then the menu gave no indication of what genre each station was tuned for, nor even thought that by 2077 it might make contextual sense for a GTAV-like display that told you exactly what was playing on that station at the time or even take it to the next level and display how far along the song was.

There are a lot of bigger things that made me wonder at what point in development did CDPR consider a thing "done" that was either solved or improved upon by other companies in the interim but this little thing really put me off for some reason, again even forgiving that the game grinds to a complete halt to simply display a list of radio stations.

@nodima: There are so many small things in this game that are terribly unpolished like that. Beyond the technical bugs everything about the UI feels half-baked. There are parts of the game that are really good and well-designed. The main missions tend to be long and involved and have some good bespoke locations and some interesting events. The city itself looks great in some even though the layout is...questionable. Then you get into the menus and try to manage your inventory and it all falls apart. Or there are jumps and gaps in conversations that are confusing and leave you wondering if that was a bug or the game just didn't have stuff written (I think sometimes it's both.) Or you see the issues with the progression system (which is both unexplained and boring) or the radio, or the fact that all the shops are totally generic and you just scratch your head.

I think they definitely ran out of time on this thing not just from a technical perspective.

This is one of the big issues with open world design, which is that they focus on "more" for the sake of "more." Do we need 17 cyberpsycho encounters when they're all pretty much the same thing? Do we need dozens upon dozens of random crimes and gang activity events? Couldn't some of that time and money have been spent on some of these half-baked systems or controls or whatever?

I like Cyberpunk 2077. I do. I have been bashing it a lot in this thread because there are a lot of baffling decisions, but it's a fun Fallout style game and it has a lot of great visual charm and good environments, and while I think the writing can be bad and most of the characters are unlikable they aren't awful and some of them have their moments and the story picks up steam as it goes.

But this is yet another game where I'm like "man I really hope they improve a bunch of stuff for the sequel because they could have something special here." Or given CDPR's history they could make a big 30 expansion that fixes all this stuff. Set it in another city or something. I'd really love to play a version of this game that fixed all the small stuff because a lot of it keeps the parts that are really really good from shining through. And again I'm not talking technical bugs here, I'm talking about design and implementation even when the systems are working as intended.

It is an interesting discussion because it brings up so many things that do not register with me whatsoever.

I've only played a few hours but I wasnt that impressed. The biggest thing thats preventing me from playing it is how damn small the text is, i'm sure it's fine on a monitor but on a TV it's ridiculous.

It's especially dumb since CDPR made the same mistake with The Witcher 3. I'm not sure how difficult it is to have scalable text options but Wasteland 3 has it, which is also a pretty beefy RPG.

@boozak: I'm assuming this is on the console versions as well but on PC there is a Font size option available in Sound because video game menus Never Change.

Might be subtitles only though, not sure about lore books and such.

I don't find V "all over the map". My female V comes off as a sarcastic asshole because that's her public persona she uses when interacting with strangers in a city that seems mostly made up of people ranging from guarded to outright dickheads. I appreciate her softer moments where she seems to only let down her guard like the one side mission where you meet up with Jackie's mom. I'm not far in enough that maybe that was only an outlier but to me it seems like V has a wider range of personality that she only shows to people she likes.

As for all of the other nitpicks I think this is the consequence of how much CDPR and its fans hyped this game up to an insane degree. It's only because of this that people are dissecting every nook and cranny trying to figure out why there isn't more or why this decision was made.

A lot of the UI elements to me is just reminiscent of Witcher 3 that clunky ass Ui when it first launched but personally what has disappointed me the most has been the shallow world. It looks fantastic, it's densely populated but there's nothing in it. The only in-world gameplay moments come from dumb street fights and you're fed side missions via phone calls from people you've never met before. It brings you back to thinking if any of this shit was better planned out before the reality of hitting a shipping deadline sunk in.

@colourful_hippie: I played male V. so I don't know if female V. is substantially different, but it's definitely not just a public vs. private persona thing. V. will often swing wildly within the same conversation with the same person. It's definitely not random (there are people he likes more and he's nicer to them, of course) but it's weird and there's no real established personality. It's funny that the first part of the game is setting your backstory and then other than a few conversation options that don't do anything it just does not matter. I would much rather have had them just give me a character to play than this weird compromise thing.

Also my issues with the game have nothing to do with hype, which I mostly avoided. The UI is legitimately awful. It doesn't tell you things you need to know and it lacks basic functionality for the things it wants you to do. The issues like the radio on bike are admittedly minor things but I notice those kinds of thing in every game I play.

I have more tolerance for the shallow side stuff because it's clear that they sunk most of the time and effort into the main mission lines, and that's a legitimate choice. Skyrim had a lot of shallow side stuff but also some very involved side stuff, but it also has like an 8 hour main quest if you just focus on that. Cyberpunk has a lot less side stuff but a much longer and more developed main storyline. That's part of what people complain about when they say it's linear, but from a development perspective it makes sense because everyone who plays through the game will see the main story stuff. I do wish there was more variety to the random encounters and more interesting stuff to do in the open world, but I think that's true for almost every open world game I can think of. What games really fully realize and exploit their open worlds? Activities generally boil down to random combat encounter, collectables of various kinds, races (which Cyberpunk has, for some reason even though the car driving is terrible) and then random traversal challenges, which don't really make sense in a game like this.

That's distinct from side quests, which are admittedly not the best in this game, but again the main quests are so involved and detailed that I feel like that's a legit design choice rather than an actual issue with the game (unlike the terrible UI and the fact that you can't listen to radio on foot.)

@colourful_hippie: It's not revolutionary, but its fun. I'm glad I was never on the hype train because now I'm just enjoying it for what it is: an above-average but not necessarily innovative RPG. It doesn't do anything particularly new but the risk they took to create a completely new IP with a strong creative vision is praiseworthy in a world full of sequels and cinematic universes. For me this is enough. They gave me the same (non-ubisoft style) open world game I know and love but with a setting and tone that stands out. Also, I'm playing on a beefy PC so the graphical fidelity feels like the start of a new era and no doubt is a big factor in my enjoyment of the game. It's the biggest jump for me since the push to HD on the Xbox 360.

@nasar7: This is not a new IP. It's an adaptation of a pre-existing tabletop RPG that's been around forever (and has a lot of ancillary stuff like novels and comics etc...) The vast majority of the creative vision including many of the characters (like Johnny Silverhand and co.) and gangs and corporations etc... all come from that.

Doesn't mean it's not great to see it in video game form, but this is definitely not a fresh IP, just a video game adaptation of an existing one.

Kirk Hamilton did a useful thing on the Triple Play podcast directly juxtaposing the line reads from a really simple moment in the game from both actors where V is looking at a broken car engine or something like that. The male line reads are dry and flat in a way that sounds super generic while the female line reads have all kinds of implications like scrunching her face to think harder or breathing differences to imply a change in mood.

I'm also playing Male V and since I'm finding so much of this game broken and/or undercooked on PS4 he feels plenty appropriate for my experience but it seems pretty clear that male V is a stage actor trying to voice act while the female V is a veteran voice actor who, as Kirk said, "knows how to act without using her face."

@bigsocrates: I just disagree on the V stuff but I can't comment on the male V who I avoided mainly from what I heard he sounded like in marketing material and also maybe the female V breaks down in a similar way that you're talking about later in the game but from what I've played I just don't see it.

Act 1 though is just a mess. It comes off as something thoroughly compromised with the bad pacing, quick jump to montage that papers over any early character development. It was a weak opener for me.

RDR 2 is a prime example of an open world that comes off as something more interactive with emergent moments but maybe it's unfair to compare any other open world game to what Rockstar does. It doesn't help either with how Cyberpunk doles out side mission details via phone calls, it feels so disjointed.

V is "Thank god the worst person I know is my best friend" and I felt like this was consistent for the entire game.

I also only have experience with the lady V but I think she's a great protagonist. That's something I have almost no qualifiers for in regards to this game.

Also my disappointment with the shallow open world doesn't just stem from how they marketed this game, it comes from their track record from the Witcher games. Witcher 2 was dense yet not an open world but Witcher 3 still managed to flesh out their open world that I thought they would have carried over some of those lessons into Cyberpunk. I guess they just bit off way more than what they could chew by making their very first FPS game set in a dense urban environment.

There's just too many parallels with this game and Witcher 1 that also felt like a weird amalgamation of disparate systems slotted clumsily together into 1 game and it took 2 subsequent games to refine that process to a sheen.

I guess I just have some trouble parsing what people want in an ideal open world.

But I'm a checklist sort. I enjoy clear activities over little meticulous details.

@colourful_hippie: I have found that choosing non-asshole options for my female V has generally been the superior choice even if the situation strongly suggests you should strong arm or intimidate someone. There was a quest where I had to question someone and the asshole version resulted in me knocking them out after two lines of questions. When I chose to play the good cop despite really disliking the person I was talking to I got a whole lot more info out of them that, while not necessary to quest completion, did a lot more to frame the situation for me.

But I feel like generally in games this has typically been the case. Playing the asshole has almost always resulted in shorter dialog exchanges as it usually shuts down the conversation or puts the NPC in a defensive state where they are no longer willing to share info. It's a shame that so few games are able to handle being a bad guy well instead of it being relegated to a fun NG+ or second playthrough option where you don't necessary stand to lose anything from those shorter interactions.

@efesell: Checklist open worlds became a dime a dozen by the end of the last generation. I want more.

RDR 2 came close to that but fell somewhat flat because all of their main missions devolve into repetitive shoot outs. At least Cyberpunk isn't so quick to devolve into a shootout all of the time. The structure of the open world in RDR2 was what was different from the rest and that could may be a result of it mostly being a barren wilderness in the American West or Rockstar having near infinite resources/time/labor or both versus having to try to make something on that level plausible in a dense metropolis.

I guess I have to wait for the next GTA or Cyberpunk 3 to answer that question.

@colourful_hippie: To me I take something like RDR2 and spend a few hours marveling as just the scope of all that's in there and after that it's just a place. It's just a place that I'm in and now I wanna see what things I can do in it.

Ideally, I want a Rockstar open world as that's come to be defined. Other open worlds have looked interesting, but nothing has felt as organic as stumbling across optional content in Red Dead. You could find a house with three dead guys at a poker table and if you lingered long enough, their friends would return to find you looting the place and blame you for the murders. You'd see a house in a valley with the lights on at night, ride down to it and discover a whole little horror movie involving two siblings and their mother, or find a shack in the mountains that told a whole story about the person who lived there (and granted you a fancy shotgun). These were bespoke, completely missable moments that they didn't mark on a map or drop hints about but were clearly authored and hoped to be found - I've been yearning for that sort of feeling ever since, and I wish RDR2 weren't so damned intimidating as a time sink so I'd be more tempted to run it back.

Even going back to GTA V, if you slowed down and just wandered around the environment there were dozens of little stories to stumble across. Franklin's mom had a whole subplot in the first act, for example, that you'd only experience if you went back home to smoke weed and watch TV semi frequently. Hell, go back to GTA IV on a rainy day in the projects and you could listen to three people talk about how bad the weather is, one of the people would say they have to leave to make a phone call, and then you could follow them for two minutes while they made the call. It's all superfluous and ultimately isn't the main thing I want out of an open world game, but it's the sort of stuff that makes the open world feel purposeful.

When I compare those experiences to other games I've played like Watch Dogs 2, The Witcher 3, Spider-Man, Assassin's Creed Freedom Cry, Ghost of Tsushima, Outer Worlds, Vampyr or Horizon, the open worlds mostly just feel like implications of worlds rather than actual worlds. Some of those I like more than others, but the artificiality of them is never lost on me whereas sometimes I would load up GTA IV just to take a ride across town in a cab and listen to the sounds of the city. With the amount of time this game was in the oven and the precedent set by TW3, it seemed like Cyberpunk could have been that sort of experience.

Instead it's the complete opposite, with a phone that never quits ringing and an activity log that never quits expanding - it's a combination of GTA IV's friend system and Mass Effect 3's constant barrage of information that feels so soulless and quickly feels overwhelming, doubly so because the player doesn't even have any idea who these people are other than the district's "boss" and will never actually meet them.

@efesell: I'm right there with you currently. I thought I had moved on, but Ghost of Tsushima revitalized my checklisting ways.

And I, too, am generally high on cyberpunk despite having a million complaints. It's just easier to talk about the issues once you get through the derivative nature of the game.

One big confusion I have is why they have interactable doors to most buildings but they are all [locked]. Are they used later for side quests? And these aren't the doors that you can open with skill checks.

I also haven't run into any proper side quests that aren't beat on the brat, delamain cab company and the psycho fights despite being partway through act 2. So i might try and go looking for a scripted side quest today.

@nodima: That stuff is in Cyberpunk it's just...not great. And it all being marked on your map automatically is kind of a bummer. I found one sidequest where there's a guy with a malfunctioning cybernetic implant who asks you to get a car and take him to a ripperdoc. It's not through a fixer or anything you just find him in a courtyard. But he's marked on your map if you get close to him, and the execution is...it's fine and even kind of funny but it's not as detailed or well scripted as GTA is.

So it's not that the side stuff is fundamentally not there, it's just that it's mostly pretty meh, and too much of it is just repetitive "fight a bunch of random punks" without nearly enough flavor or context.

Rockstar's whole thing is clockwork worlds. They've been doing them longer than anyone else, they have the biggest budget because they sell at astonishing levels (GTA V is 'quietly' one of the biggest selling games ever and has raked in literally billions if you include GTA online) and they just have more experience with them. They're not doing fundamentally different things they're just doing them better and more organically. Some of the stuff you can do in a Rockstar game isn't necessary in Cyberpunk. I don't need to be able to play other video games, or golf, or tennis, or any of that stuff, but it would be nice if the side quests were more organic and just better.

GTA IV was such a revelation. I don't think anything else has been as big a quantum leap in open world design since. It's not just the ridiculous number of side things you could do (like go see stand up comedy, play darts, go on a version of OK Cupid and try to date women, read the news etc...) but the city was just full of life, as you've said. GTA V's city is too, but it's more of an incremental improvement.

On the other hand the actual stories of GTA games tend to be not very good. Cyberpunk has much deeper characters and more interesting combat than those games. It's much more mechanically dense with its hacking and stealth and complex melee system etc...

@nodima: That's the kind of stuff I'm alluding to when I talk about the RDR2 open world. There's a real reason for why it's an open world. Cyberpunk's reason, at least in its current state, seems to just be to present you with a detailed futuristic environment to ogle at and not much else. It honestly gives me L.A. Noire vibes. L.A. Noire is little more than a detective adventure game that they tried to make it bigger than what it actually was by building this very detailed 60s L.A. city for you to drive in but it was only there for presentation and window dressing, not much else.

And yes even a game like RDR2 you can water it down into something resembling a checklist by solely going to dots on a map but that doesn't eliminate the other option of simply exploring the environment by yourself to see what you stumble across. The only thing I've stumbled across in Cyberpunk is XYZ aggro street gang in an alley or phone call from guy I don't know.