I thought the hacking game was potentially interesting at first because it seemed like it might a tiny mini puzzle of quickly identifying what you need to hit to keep the chain going to get all three bonuses.

But I think instead it's just like.. sometimes you get a shitty draw and you'll fail a couple of them right out the gate.

For many of those who actually know the cyberpunk universe and lore it most definitely is the definitive cyberpunk experience. Nothing even comes close.

Hard to tell if this is some sort of bug, or some weird thing they had to do for rating certification, but I noticed that when I'm full naked, my character appears naked in the equipment menu, full clothed when I look down at them in the game world, and when I look in the mirror is naked, but missing their genitalia. Just seems odd.

So don't take the Knife Throwing perk because it isn't want it seems like.

Or rather it is exactly what it seems like and that's bad because it lets you throw your one knife if you are using a knife as a melee weapon and I am at a 100% rate of having the knife vanish from the world once it has been thrown thus far.

I really wished this game had hit right for me. I'm about 4 hours in, and the gameplay has been fairly okay (the stealth, gunplay, and hacking are all good, though not great). But I love the city. I love driving around in it, I love walking through the bars, and looking up at the sky in the middle of the street and seeing the high-rises above me is great. The story has not blown me away thus far, but it feels like a good vehicle to take me from one place in the world to another, and just walk those Night City streets. It feels a like a game I could've really sunk into for a couple of weeks. I don't mind some of the aspects like side-missions being fairly superficial, issues that have been raised by the guys on the Bombcast for instance.

However, technically it has been so clunky that it just takes me out of the game too often, and I ended up refunding it to GOG. I'll buy it later, when I have a more powerful PC. With a GTX1060 and an intel i7 8th gen, a very much middle-of-the-road PC, I got acceptable (but not great performance out of medium setting, with the framerate somewhere between 35 and 45 fps. I could've lived with that, but there are too many visual bugs that really take me out of the experience, and for this game I really need the ability to sink into it and kind of forget it is a video game.

The palm tree textures often overlay every other thing that is being rendered in the environment, so I'll be staring at a wall and see clusters of weird, small palm tree silhouettes everywhere. It ruins the look of the city. The same goes for the smoke effect, which doesn't show as smoke to me but rather just white rectangles. And during story scenes there is often a an object that is just frozen in place, like chopsticks floating in front of Jackie's face the whole time while I was talking to him at a Chinese food stand early on. That type of stuff, in combination with the less-than-ideal performance (even at the lowest settings I am not getting far above 45-55 fps), makes me think that I should just wait. It's a shame, because I feel myself getting sucked in early on. I will likely enjoy this game a fair bit somewhere in the next couple of years. But man, those trees and that smoke... really make the environment look like shit far too often for me to be able to forgive it. Hope they can fix those types of issues relatively soon. After all these years, it feels like a pretty serious anti-climax, and I feel bad for the long-suffering grunt developers at CDPR who have had to do so much crunch in the name of putting out a product that "lived up to fan expectations", and have it be in this state in the launch week.

@thisismrle: What could be truer to the source material than a huge corporation crunching its employees hard only to put out a flawed and buggy product that's sold on hype and flashy marketing. That's the cyberpunk world to a T! The only thing that could make it better would be if the game included a root kit and virus that allowed CDPR access to people's computers and personal information!

In all seriousness, while I definitely wouldn't say that this is the "ultimate" cyberpunk experience for a lot of reasons, it is packed with references to the source material, from corporations and technology to characters and events. At times it gets the ambiance from the illustrations in those books really right, though I think it is lacking in many areas as well. But it's the first video game that makes a serious attempt to adapt that material and it does better at that than most video games do with their sources; which is unsurprising given that this comes from the guys who did The Witcher.

I had to reload a save point an hour prior to a game halting bug. When I needed to call somebody, I'd open the call list, press the appropriate button, and the button wouldn't respond. I even tried using the keyboard. It didn't work. My V's hair seems to have disappeared in the character inventory screen. He's also super blurry for some reason. He wasn't that way during the first 3 hours of play time. I haven't fucked with any other graphical settings since before this play through started.

Another one I've come across is how annoying it is to dodge/crouch. When I want to dodge, V crouches. When I want to crouch, it only works half of the time. Who the fuck thought making the controls the way they are was the absolute best way to go? TW3 controls were kind of clunky at first but I think most of us got used to them. They should have stuck with those controls and focused less on the button hold stuff. It's fucking stupid. The hand-to-hand, gunplay, swordplay, and stealth are all shitty and feel bland. The hacking isn't annoying as I thought it would be but I prefer to keep from having to do it as much as possible. Crafting serves no purpose other than medkits and grenades. Why craft shitty weapons and gear when you can hit up a merchant for better stuff?

Nothing in this game is original. It's more like a cyberpunk Fallout with all kinds of jank, bugs, bullshit, and button hold presses found in RDR2. All of the vehicles I've driven so far handle like a forklift on ice. I didn't follow the hype train since I didn't want to develop unrealistic expectations. I just want a fun game where I can feel engaged and interested in the characters and surrounding world. There is none of that in this game. TW3 set the bar so damn high. What the fuck have CDPR been doing for 8 years? TW3's graphics also look way better than this game's. Hopefully some better texture mods come out in the coming days and weeks. I don't really like the reshades some of the modders have put on Nexus. They're either too dark or the colors are a bit off for my liking.

I agree with a lot of folks that the intro feels weirdly compressed and inconsequential, especially with the montage. I played Street Kid, and I was actually pretty invested in the drama they set up around the fixers and gangs, but it went nowhere, and then you're just dumped out into the open world, same as everybody else.

I'm really disappointed with the dialogue so far. To be fair, I'm coming off Disco Elysium, which is absurdly good at letting you turn your playable character into whatever batshit combination of weirdo thoughts and ideologies you want, but the Cyberpunk system is insanely linear. There's one dialogue choice that will advance the conversation to the next phase, and it's highlighted in yellow. Every other choice just makes you banter a little more before moving on, and while some of it is interesting, it's all extremely inessential. The timed response thing is kind of interesting in like a David Cage kind of way, but I'm not actually sure they change anything; I've never failed one, but I have a hard time believing that doing so would dramatically alter the course of the mission or conversation. V also seems like weirdly boy-scout-ish and naive so far; I don't know how much replay value the game's going to have if you're pigeon-holed into playing the good guy in every scenario.

I just completed The Pickup (the mission they demoed a long while back where you pick up the spider bot from the Maelstrom dudes with the weird cavern faces, and it was the first time that I felt like the game really clicked for me. I was really surprised at how many different ways the mission could go based on the optional objectives you completed and even whether or not you chose to inspect/hack the credit chip the corpo gives you. I fully expected the mission would always play out the way it did in the demo, but I ended up wiping the virus off of the credit chip and teaming up with the Maelstrom to help fight off Militech. I also stumbled upon the original leader of the Maelstrom and freed him, and he implied that he'd show up again and help me out later. I was cool on the game up to this point, but I'm now really excited for it and hope that the rest of the game also allows for this kind of flexibility and mission depth. Also, Dum-Dum is my little scoop-faced drug buddy and I love him. I wish I could dump Jackie and his godawful interjection of Spanish words into every sentence for him. That isn't how code-switching works! He feels like an extra from a network TV show circa 2005 whose defining characteristic is that he's "The Hispanic One," and by god will his every line of dialogue make sure you remember that.

I’m having an absolute blast with this game. Initially, I encountered a large number of bugs right out of the gate with the day 1 patch. I downloaded the latest Nvidia driver and almost all of the bugs have been fixed now. I’m playing at 1440p Ultra on a 1080Ti. No complaints from me......this game is epic and digging it’s claws into me stronger than Witcher 3 did.

I have now encountered an effectively game breaking bug. Karma for complaining about too many pedestrians maybe.

All the cars and people can be seen at a far distance but any closer they just pop out of existance, and I am walking around empty streets. This has effected all my saves and doesn't change when I reload. It does seem to be localised to one area of the map but it is a huge area, maybe half of the initial map thats accessible.

I now have a choice, play in an empty world, restart after about 16 hours, or wait hoping it gets patched.

Fuck!

2 hours in, on Xbox One X, TLDR: Consider this game Early Access. Not kidding.

Remember how GTAIV at launch ran on consoles? this can be worse at times, and weirdly super fast in random times.

Mind you im typically a person who gets the good side of a buggy game, I'm usually lucky I guess.

Not this one! And beyond the bugs the graphics are super inconsistent - like a super blurry looking poster with extremely clear sharp 4k looking graffiti on it., and I think the HDR is broken. not sure yet need to tweak. Some street food looks like food, others looks like a GTA4

Glitches: NECKS on EVERYONE for some reason glitch all over the place, like you can see where they just disconnect from the head. its WEIRD. Clothes disappearing in the mirror immediately - thought maybe my character just always wanted to be naked in the apartment. I had to go into inventory and put on new clothes and they came on. Here we go, first time stepping out of the new car in NC and coming back out, car was floating like 10 feet in the air. During a Jackie dialogue in the car somehow the sound glitched and I got echo dialogue. People floating not walking up stairs. A HARD CRASH. But at least that fixed the "cant change the camera in car" bug i was having before. AND the autosaving was pretty good. I just thought maybe the car was only First Person view in the city, maybe a specific choice, nope, bug. Okay and once almost ALL the NPCS started running out of the apartments into the street, it was like a weird mass exodus.

Weirdly in-combat the game doesn't seem to glitch?!?

These were immediate upon booting the game and getting into night city. The density of bugs is incredible.

The variance of issues here is fascinating.

This was my first bug from the Nomad intro.

13 or so hours in, invested in a stealth build and I am blown away with how much this feels like a far cry game (moment to moment stealth and combat with a pretty copy/paste feeling throughout), except traversing across the city is boring (mafia-level driving) and just about zero immergent moments as I make my way around the city.

The presentation is top notch - it reminds me of Bioshock in that it never takes you out of the first person camera, even for cutscenes, which is cool. But of course, that’s if there are no bugs going on. Had a pretty dramatic scene toward end of Act 1 turn hilarious when a character’s head suddenly had his gun clipping through it. He goes to give me a chip out of his head to put in mine, and the gun was in his hand instead. So naturally, he puts the gun in my head, which clipped through my face since it’s in first person and the gun being bigger than a neural chip.

So far, I feel pretty underwhelmed by it all.

Well, I'm certainly getting what I asked for when I went back on my word and bought this game because of the bad word of mouth for the PS4 version. This game looks incredible in motion with all the filters turned on, it's an absolute digital mess. At times it feels like I'm experiencing a weird sort of watercolor world and I've created this sort of headcanon where this is all actually taking place in a Matrix of some kind.

Unfortunately, having just finished The Pickup, I'm finding the gameplay pretty subpar. The menus are confusing as hell and clearly not designed for a controller at all. I decided to pick Hard difficulty for...no clear reason other than it sounded like Rob Zacny was recommending it, but for me all that means is dumping dozens of rounds into each enemy while overdosing on med huffs. I've always found stealth in first person inscrutable and that hasn't changed here so the couple combat encounters I've had where stealth seemed viable I just ignored it as quickly as I could.

I also don't really understand the Watch Dogs bits of the game, I'm just opting for the blinding effect as often as I can for now.

The first boss fight was pretty lame and seemed like it would have gone on forever...if I hadn't had about a dozen frag grenades, which I just chucked all of at his feet and ended him in about a minute. But then Jackie warped through the door to exit the area and I wasn't able to open it on my own...so I restarted and did that all over again...

Afterward I ran into a pedestrian while on the phone with Dex and the game hard crashed. I reloaded and had to do that fight a third time, attempted to go do a side gig involving Pachinko machines and on my first shot fired...the game hard crashed, and after reloading I had to do that boss fight again...

So I decided to skip the side gig and go straight to The Afterlife, only I ran into a pedestrian and the game hard-locked for a few seconds to load the tooltip about police. I was so close to Jackie I assumed the game might work like a GTA where if I activated the quest before the police arrived I could just ignore the consequences but while we were talking on the streets the police arrived and started shooting. Jackie continued to ignore them while delivering his dialogue about his mom, so I tried to rush into the club for safety but couldn't open the door...and couldn't take out any weapons because the game thought I was indoors or something, so died and turned off the game.

All that was a real bummer because last night I didn't encounter anything like that, it was just a blurry mess that I was pretty into. Well, I did wander into an undercover cop's hotel room and loot everything in the room, even walking right up behind her without her reacting...but when I doubled back to check for anything I might have missed, I noticed her laptop and attempted to log on but she immediately swiveled around, yelled at me and pulled her gun. I'd have gladly handled her passively like the fixer had asked me to but the game made that encounter so difficult to read we wound up in an awkward shootout.

Otherwise, the sound design is awesome, the voice work is good (Jackie isn't great but he isn't as lame as the preview made him out to be) and I love how dense the game feels even if it occasionally makes it confusing to navigate, I'll trade map legibility for what I've seen so far. I'm very interested to meet more characters and see more locations, and what little I've seen of the weapons so far makes me optimistic I'll find some overpowered weapons that trivialize a lot of the combat in fun ways.

But so far I'm a little taken aback by how unbalanced this game is between excellent and awful with almost no room for any mediocrity. I guess the lore stuff is mostly mediocre, but I expected that as I often find games set in the future - but not the far, outer space future - have a much tougher time creating fiction that isn't cheesy or hamfisted.

Anyway, add my voice to the legion crying out that the PS4 version as it stands is a total waste of money unless you're just morbidly curious as I was.

I'm really enjoying the actual main story missions and the side jobs fill my personal need for checklists in a cool world but I could see them grating on someone without that.

I think a lot of the game's issues can be summed up in how it lets you customise your character's genitalia, and then promptly dumps you into first-person, never to see it ever again.

Lots of systems, some of which are good and interesting, and none of it really meshes. But it does look very pretty.

Also, the writing is terrible. I can't believe they actually did a montage like 30 minutes into the game that just skips all the interesting character development for yourself and Jackie. Good lord. That's like something you do as a joke.

I guess I'm in the minority cause I thought that montage was kinda funny. I was not actually interested in playing a dozen hours or whatever of your main character and Jackie getting to know each other and doing odd jobs. I'm okay if we just establish that and move on.

@efesell: It's not that playing through the montage is necessary, it's that the montage basically wipes out the playable prologue. You start at a very specific moment in the character's life, without a lot of background about how they got there etc.., then you see some event that is supposed to change everything...and then you see flashes of events where they go through the actual changes and then you're dumped into the new life.

It's weird writing and it's totally unclear what purpose it serves.

Jackie and you have an established relationship even during the prologue (at least for the corporate beginning) so all you'd have to do is replace the montage with Jackie asking you to help out on a job and you could basically go right into the first mission, except you'd need some dialogue introducing T-bug I guess. There are a lot of ways to move directly into the main game without the weird montage that skips a lot of character development that is actually more important than the part you play (like establishing your street relationships and the knowledge that V. has when the game proper starts.)

It's not a huge problem but it's very odd pacing and kind of jarring. It just seems totally unnecessary and doesn't add much. Meanwhile it has the effect of introducing you to your character, giving you control, then completely changing that character over a wild 6 months, and then having you have to kind of relearn them after that (when you have to pick up a bunch of new relationships and what your situation is etc...)

@efesell: yeah I'm right there with you. I didn't think the montage took the place of the prologue, because the next couple story missions are still tutorial stuff. And I feel like movies do that sort of montage after a friendship is born all the time.

@efesell: I liked it as well. Instantly bonds you with this character. Like the beginning of Goodfellas, but more cyber-y.

@bigsocrates: Maybe it varies more on the intro. For the street kid one I feel like I got all that I needed out of that quick sequence and wasn't particularly put off by the shift.

i just uninstalled it, my patience for it ran out. On top of that i don't think it's a very good game.

@efesell: I obviously can't say because I only played through one, but I plan to roll another character at some point so maybe my opinion will change.

My main issue with it is that it seems like it totally disconnects the prologue from the main game. Compare it to another game from this year, Marvel's Avengers. That game also does a time skip after the prologue, but there the prologue does a lot to set up what comes after. All the characters it introduces come back in the main game, it teaches you about the powers of the Avengers etc... and while a few things happen between prologue and main game, they are all explained at the start of the main game. It feels closely connected.

In Cyberpunk you meet a bunch of characters and get to know them a little, but as far as I can tell only one actually carries into the main game (it's possible that the others will show up further than where I am.) You don't really learn any skills or systems except the very basic controls. And you skip over a massive number of really important events in the character's life that the game never explains (though you pick them up from context, which is fine.)

It just made the prologue seem like kind of a waste of time, as compared to something like Mass Effect that also lets you pick your background and mentions it during the game, but doesn't have you play through it. It also seems at odds with the rest of the game, which is very much about putting you through your whole character experience including traveling to and from missions, entering and exiting buildings etc.

Is this a big deal? No. Is it possible that later in the game they will integrate stuff from the prologue that will make it feel more essential? Absolutely. But where I am in the game it just feels like the prologue is totally disconnected from the rest of the game.

@bigsocrates: It probably helps a little that there's not really a fundamental difference of who you are as a street kid and who you are in the main game so it really doesn't transition you very much it's just more like now you have a new friend.

I should definitely also check out the other intros sometime.

Yeah, I downloaded the new drivers and gave it one last try. It fixed a lot of the issues I had with it, and it's finally starting to click for me. I guess there's a reason why the top 1 story on their launcher now is "GO INSTALL DRIVERS!"

Playing on an Xbox One S, and aside from the graphical downgrade, the only real bug I’ve had so far was that I got stuck in a wall during a mission.

I've had two crashes two desktop but not much consequential progress lost. That said, this game paints such a stark picture of why Rockstar, despite their labor misgivings and internal strife, is so critically lauded. Open world is difficult, and this is a game that without question fails to make it engaging. I echo Vinny's and Ron's comments on the Beastcast that Night City completely fails to grasp me in the same way say, Los Santos or RDR's Wild West did.

I wish they had thrown all this clutter out and just made a cohesive narrative. The city life feels so dry and flavorless, I'm struggling to understand why it's there. Instead of being something that makes the experience cohesive, I just groan every time I'm thrown back in the open world. There may be thousands of things to do, but I don't have any interest in exploring it.

I’m still in the beginning of the game but yikes so far all of the voice acting isn’t great. I’ve encountered bugs and weirdness but you can’t patch in a second pass at a spoken line. Or I mean I guess you could but there are a lot of more important problems that should probably be addressed first.

@superjoe said:

This was my first bug from the Nomad intro.

If every bug was like this I might consider buying the game

@slowhanded: I'm a little further in and I'm starting to like the game a bit more. I think that the city being so sprawling and difficult to navigate/figure out is kind of intentional. You're supposed to feel like a rat trapped in a giant maze because that's the sort of the atmosphere the source material plays into. They definitely could have made some areas more distinct and done more to bring out the bright corporate sheen overlaying the rot, but I can see the atmosphere they're going for and I think it sort of works.

I think that at times the game does a really good job of creating the feel of a cold and hostile city that doesn't give a damn about you or anybody else. It may not be quite as fun as the more playgroundy open worlds we're used to, but it can be very atmospheric if you just let its groove envelop you.

This game has a lot of problems beyond just its various bugs, and the UI needs a complete overhaul at least on console, but as a differently flavored Fallout game it has its charms. Those games tended to have big sprawling kind of flavorless areas too, but they called them wastelands.

@youeightit: Somebody never played the original Destiny I take it.

@bigsocrates: haha wow I completely forgot about that. But also, Destiny had far fewer things on the “must fix” list ahead of Peter Dinklage.

Actually, I really didn’t mind him at all. I did play Destiny and enjoyed my time with it quite a bit. But good lord 2014 was about two full lifetimes ago.

I'm enjoying the voice work for the most part. V, as least lady V, has that same weird Geralt effect where the first time I heard it I was like "Oh wow this is what we sound like huh" that has completely faded into "Of course this is what we sound like this is what we're supposed to sound like".

I'm enjoying the male V to be honest, though part of that has to do with the fact I drunkenly paired him to a bleached blonde female with 3-inch nails so every time he holds his hands up in front of the camera or I go into the inventory screen I'm like, heh, oh yeah..

So I'm a couple hours past the late title card now and I think Jeff Bakalar's opinion is probably closest to mine based off what he said in the recent Beastcast. I'm still not as negative as him but I agree in that I think the real star of this game is Night City itself. A lot of work went into rendering this complex looking city but at the same time I'm not getting any emergent gameplay moments from the world itself. Missions so far have been exclusively doled out by phone calls and some of the mission givers I have never even met yet, like they just cold called me. It's weird.

It's still too early for me to comment on whether the side missions are weak or if there really is no emergent gameplay moments that spawn in the open world but I can only count 1 so far which involved a random work of graffiti that appeared on a wall while I was walking around the city. I'm also not expecting to run into some Bloody Baron level of quality in a side mission just yet in what barely feels like the first third of this game.

I agree with a lot of this. Looking back at the first section of the game leading up to the late title card it all felt like a wash. It was very aimless.

You go through one mission, for me I started Nomad, and then you're immediately thrown into a cutscene montage that speeds you through characters and fixer introductions. You then become best buds with a lot people and that's it, you're a mission or two away from the big time while simultaneously getting bombarded with texts and phone calls for small side missions. It felt overwhelming for me without adding any emotional stakes to what I was doing. It wasn't till after the late title card where shit happens that focuses the narrative and then some characters and story start to fall into place better.

I think the pacing in that opening act was just off. Maybe have me do a couple missions first, let me play a little more leading up to when I meet my first fixer, and then shortly after that throw the montage at me. I didn't have a problem with the montage in specific but more so of when and how quickly it happened. It was just jarring.

All that said I can't stop comparing this game to the recent Deus Ex and I'm vastly enjoying this more. The shooting and hacking abilities mesh better here than in that game, the world is bigger and at least on the surface is more interesting to look at, and the writing has been ok for me for the most part. The one time where it felt like it approached Borderlands edgy territory was when during that early mission where you meet up with the maelstrom gang. Also V has more depth to her, mine is a woman, beyond the sarcastic asshole routine you're exposed to for a few hours, specifically in the mission where you meet Jackie's mom. I personally don't mind her sarcastic asshole schtick because her line delivery has been top tier so far but I'm happy to see more depth to the character.

I'll stick with this game.

Definitive Cyberpunk experience in video games? Sure, seeing as it's the only Cyberpunk game out there, except for some random platformer.

Definitive cyberpunk experience in video games? Not in a world where Deus Ex and Human Revolution exist, no.

Boy, male V voice acting is....not great.

@justin258: Yeah I very much like the Deus Ex "cyberpunk" universe the most over this game but I never liked actively playing them and fell off both of the two recent games unlike this game.

Just a few minutes in because I don’t have time to play right now, but I hate the way they blur things in your character’s periphery. It probably looks good in very specific sequences, but just trying to look around the world, it is super distracting. I honestly thought the game was running at a crazy low res, but it’s not that. It’s like an gaussian blur filter in photoshop, but the center of the screen is clear. Super weird. None of the graphics options seem to turn it off either.

That said, playing it has been a more positive experience than I expected. I’m not sure what it is about the cadence of conversation and dialogue choices vs other action RPGs, but this feels closer to a Dontnod game in terms of its “choose your own adventure-ness”—and I like that. Maybe it’s that it feels like I’m having real conversations (as corny as they are) compared to something like Mass Effect where every character feels like a Wikipedia article.

Also, I saw that you can’t edit your character after starting, so I spent like an hour on the character creator and hell, I sure wish they would let me go back into the editor without starting over.

@superjoe: lmao I had that exact same thing happen, plus homeboy started shooting me. I think he's just chilling there in the air immediately when you pull out of the garage.

This game has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster. I went from absolutely hating it to now starting to loving it. The hot fix today has helped with stability on PC and the writing so far has carried this game.

The prologue is an awful introduction in terms of gameplay and story. It sucks that its also like 6-10 hours long too. I kinda see why they did the Jackie montage. The less time you spend in the prologue, the better I feel. You have the most boring weapons to start with and are so limited by what you can do in combat/stealth. As you progress, there are more interesting weapons, attachments, cyberdeck programs and abilities that feel like they "make the game". I finally am at that point where I feel like I'm playing Deus Ex and not some looter shooter. Life paths just aren't good either. You might as well just play Street Kid V because that's who you are going to end up playing as after the first 20 minutes.

Jackie and Victor are not the best example of characters either because it doesn't feel like you earned their friendship. Later on there are some characters who you definitely earn their friendship or trust, which makes their relationships so much more impactful than anyone you meet in the prologue.

I've accepted that this is not the "Make your character and live out your cyberpunk fantasy" game that I wanted. V, is like Geralt. He feels like an established character that you sometimes make decisions for. You might make some big decisions, but at the end of the day, V has his own opinions sometimes. It does work though because you get way more natural conversations and story events. Just doesn't really fit the pen and paper game Cyberpunk of having that freedom to create a character that I think many were expecting.

The writing in the conversations with characters is phenomenal. It sounds very natural at points that it makes sense why V is setup to be this established character. Also I did not expect this game to have so much different philosophy. I'm having a blast with these side quests.

I honestly don't understand what they wanted to do with the prologue except just give players a starting point and context of what they have to do, because once I got passed a certain point after 10-12 hours, it's like the story and gameplay finally clicked for me.

My biggest advice for people would be this. Take your time. Game is insanely overwhelming at first. Too many mechanics and dialog and interface and icons thrown at you. Map is also cluttered as you don't really know where to go or what to do at first.

I'd stick with the story in a linear fashion and just ease up on the open world fantasy from the start. Once you see the title screen and gotten use to how the game feels then you can start to take time seeing whats around.

I will say this. I bought the official guide and used the interactive map on piggyback site. Its a lot better and allows for more structured progression. Helps understand things better.

This is the sort of game where you'll appreciate more the more you out into it even if at first you're wither overwhelmed or uninterested.

Good game so far that has the potential to be great. But they didn't do a good job of presenting the game to you in a progressive way. Witcher 3 was far better in that aspect. Slow burn but just got you invested in its mechanics and world slowly.

@colourful_hippie: can I ask you at what point does the late title card kick in? I'm a few missions into act 2 with about 16 hours and I swear I haven't seen it yet, there is late but that seems too much. Googling cyberpunk with the word late doesn't yeild anything but results about the delays.

@sarcasticmudcrab: The title card is at the end of act 1 ....

Finally had time to spend some real focused hours on it last night. About 7 hours steam shows now and I think I'm about to head into the last part of the intro mission stuff pre-title card.

First had to spend a little time tweaking more settings before I felt like I had a quality/FPS balance I felt was acceptable. My feelings have shifted a bit more towards the positive side of the spectrum but still feeling pretty neutral about it. The city itself and visuals are the star of the show as far as I'm concerned. Like RDR2, I kinda just want to walk and drive around slowly and look at everything. It's as close to Akira's Neo-Tokyo as we've ever had.

Most everything else hasn't felt great. I actually like the feel of the shooting, but I can't decide if I want to use mouse/keyboard in combat or just stick with controller for everything. Controller is comfortable/lazy. Using the mouse might make me feel like more of a john wick badass? I find myself not really using the hacking stuff during combat because.. it just interrupts the action for something that feels unnecessary. Why would I stun a guy for 3 seconds when I can just sit in cover and shoot him in the face.

Male V's voice itself I feel like I recognize from somewhere, I can't place it, haven't looked it up because thats no fun, but it bothers me lol Interface feels kinda shitty using a controller. All the loot/gear stuff has felt like.. blah? Just not interested in any of it (green arrow? guess I'll use it) but its still the intro.

I have had, as far as I've noticed, zero bugs/glitches since I started except I think I saw someones cell phone hovering mid-air for a moment. This is with a Ryzen 3900x/2080ti with latest drivers.

Oh, the other thing, as I walk around the city, wander into various nooks and crannies, picking up random junk and finding lots of locked doors but cool areas.. All I can think about is how much of a long life this game is going to have with modders and as tech showcase. Assuming you can mod it someday, people are going to make entire progression overhauls I think. Like, much more "realistic", deep RPG stuff I think.

@ares42: Thanks, I must of somehow skipped it or it bugged out then. I remember thinking how odd the non existant fanfare about going into act 2 was, just a small 'act 2' text at the side of the screen.

I've watched walk throughs of games instead of playing them but never watched one to fill in the gaps that broke in one I am playing before!

@seikenfreak: I opted for mouse and keyboard after playing with controller for a few hours. The movement and shooting just feels stiff as a cardboard on a controller where as KBM feels more fluid. Using the menus too feels more designed for a mouse than a controller but even then besides the bad music I think the other weak part of this game is the jumbled UI. It's not hard to have a trouble finding something you're looking for.

I'll still go back and forth though whenever I get lazy and just want to lay down and play it. Driving is definitely better with controller though.

@sarcasticmudcrab: yeah if you already have seen Johnny then you're in Act 2.