I reached the end of the main sidequests and started back on the main mission, but I reached an in game cool down of 1 day between missions and I decided to play some of the other side stuff and explore a bit while I waited (not realizing that a day in Cyberpunk is like 3 hours in real time.)

As soon as I went exploring the game's quality nosedived. I wasn't even just looking around, I did a bunch of gig jobs and random stuff and it ranged from boring to kind of okay. Once you have some decent weapons and cybernetics and quick hacks the combat is kind of fun, though shallow and mostly easy, but blasting groups of 6-12 thugs gets boring, as does clearing buildings. There's just not enough variety in that stuff, and most of it seems even more stamped out than Ubisoft stuff.

I did find a powerful revolver that does like 2500 damage with a headshot and with a decent armor rating I can play kind of like Robocop, charging into situations and just popping skulls, but you can only do that so many times before it gets old.

I still like the cyberpsycho stuff. That at least has some writing behind it, and unique enemies to fight.

but yeah, playing this like an open world game as opposed to a more linear RPG is a bad time. And while I have found a few cars that I kind of like to drive, so many of them have terrible visibility. They really need to patch that, at least, if not the driving model.

Also, of course, plenty of bugs.

At least the loot seems to scale with your level. I've started finding skill shards and perk shards, which are more interesting as loot goes than another uncommon rifle to disassemble.

The boxing quest chain is pretty bad. I have no real idea how you’d do it without cyber arms.

Without you still take damage on a perfect party which is some hot bullshit.

Yuuuuup. I had to give up on playing the game like this and just opted for the check-list approach. The experience has improved and I'm some interesting side stuff like the culmination of the Del A.I. chain. I'll wait till I continue to get better guns before going back to random exploration seeing on how most of those kinds of encounters are just shoot-outs.

@bigsocrates said:

I largely played this like a linear game, and I think that helped me focus on the fun. My initial experience entering new districts was overwhelming, because I had multiple fixers calling and texting out of the blue. However, after that I had a steady stream of gigs showing up in my journal along with main and side quests.

When I played Witcher 3, I enjoyed riding around the map to discover things. In Cyberpunk, I stuck to the quests I picked up along the way and didn't explore Night City all that much, which led to a more linear feeling or "guided" playthrough.

They're so bad it makes me wonder if they suffered from last minute changes to other systems and weren't re-balanced. Even when the danger level was moderate, it felt like they were narrowly tuned for someone with max Body, most of the Brawler perks, and gorilla arms. Some searching on Reddit led me to a way the cheese the fights, though I'd argue it just makes them fair. The trick is to drop a melee weapon in the ring before initiating the fight, then pick it back up by directly equipping it from the ground. It still took an absurd number of slashes to take down opponents who could destroy me in 2 punches, so using a katana instead of my fists made the fights feel balanced.

@efesell:

My character can only take one hit and next is a knock out (lvl 40 - body 12 - legendary gorilla arms). Opponents take about 50 - 100 charged punches. Only way I have managed to win some of the is by throwing legendary baseball bat into the ring and picking that up once the match starts. Still, opponents take something like 30+ hits. As a comparison normal enemies take like one or two weak blows from that bat. The final opponent seems impossible because the ring is too small to jump avoid the hits and blocking does nothing.

Once I got the gorilla arms I didn’t have any trouble because you can parry without taking damage. But prior to that I just barely beat one of the earlier fights just cause chip damage mounts up no matter what.

Something nobody has mentioned here is...does anyone else feel like money is surprisingly hard to come by in this game? It's not really necessary because you find all the loot you need and you get enough to be able to pay off the story moneysinks pretty easily, but my character is constantly having to save up for even remotely decent cyberware, and can't afford the crafting mats I'd need to craft and upgrade actually useful weapons.

The game is constantly trying to sell you cars and most of them cost more money than I've ever had at one time. Most jobs pay like 1-4k and the cars are out there at like 50. I am deep enough into the game that I'd expect to be getting a lot more cash, but it just isn't coming. It's not a massive problem per se; I can afford the cybernetics I really want (like a new deck and dem jumpy legs) but it's surprising.

I always feel like I have enough money for practical gameplay purposes but never like.. cool new car money.

@bigsocrates: I felt the same. The rate I earned money seemed a little stingy but ended up not being a problem. I rarely crafted things, so I had enough to buy what I wanted and only had to grind for eddies twice. Both times were so I could buy a surprisingly expensive vehicle, though I was glad to discover some quests have vehicle rewards.

That said, when I saw the price of certain cyberware mods and cars early on, I had assumed there would eventually be a way to make money outside of quests, e.g. investing or gambling. I had to do a double take when I saw the price of the "Guinevere"!

Like other parts of the game, I wonder if the current experience was intended or merely the result of a lot of stuff getting ripped out in the last year.

@serryl: I haven't really had to grind per se, but I've also just been happy with the quest vehicles and the cheapest car the game has (that tiny little electric car, which because it's so small has great visibility and good agility, making it more fun to drive than most of the cool looking cars in the game, which I've test driven by 'borrowing' them from dead people or random drivers in the street.) The game doesn't have good driving controls so my desire to acquire vehicles is pretty limited.

My expectation, though, was that you'd earn more and more money as you took on more difficult missions. And you do, kind of, but it's going from like $1-2k a job to $5k a job and maybe $10k for a really long and involved job with lots of story beats. I spent like 45 minutes on a mission and got like $8k, and while you can earn faster than that by doing quick "kill everyone" quests and stuff, it's just odd that the game drip feeds you money while constantly spraying you with advertisements for cars that cost over $100,000. If I wanted a $150,000 car I'd probably have to grind for 5 hours or more, and that seems...not well balanced.

I agree that something was probably different at some point. Maybe more ways to earn money through side stuff, maybe a different balance to the quest rewards, maybe they increased the prices on things late in development and didn't rebalance, I don't know.

It's not a massive problem. You can afford the stuff you need, and saving up to buy good cyberware is kind of fun because it forces you to make meaningful choices and it feels rewarding when you finally get the cash to make a big upgrade to your character (especially because the skill upgrades are so small.)

I guess it just seems weird to me that there's such a huge emphasis on trying to sell you cars but no way to make the money to buy them without putting in a bunch of time grinding.

@bigsocrates: If you get the perk that gives you 100% more cash from hacking Access Points it's pretty easy to get like $1000 per hack. Also if you get the skill that automatically breaks down junk you pick up into scrap you can then sell all that crafting stuff for thousands of bux and there is junk loot EVERYWHERE.

I regretted taking that auto junk perk just because there's a lot of junk items worth $750 and those can pile up real easily.

There are ways to manage your income to some degree by messing with junk one way or another, but we're talking probably a few thousand an hour max there. That's not the issue, because my character currently has 60k. I think the real issue is more that the car economy is out of whack with the rest of the game's economy. The rest of the game's economy sort of makes sense (except for how expensive crafting is for items that aren't more powerful than what you find) but the cars are just very pricey and there are a lot of them and they are actively pushed on you.

I'm hacking all the money nodes I can find and picking up spare eurodollars. I'm not grabbing all the junk I see because apparently looting too much is one of the ways you can set off the save corruption bug, but I'm grabbing a lot, and I have enough money. And then I get 5 offers for cars that cost more than $100k in the course of like an hour and I'm like "did I miss something? Where am I supposed to get all this money from? I can't even afford one of these."

Money has felt juuust right for me so far. Nice things feel expensive and it feels like there is a weight to certain purchases. But also, when I'm not paying attention to money and just playing its like.. Oh nice, I've got $100k+ from just doing stuff in the world. Had a little over 200k at one point and bought a few nice things (legendary craft specs, a weapon or two to try, cybernetics, etc). Still haven't bought a car because they are hella expensive and nothing in particular has grabbed me. Probably just wait til I get Silverhand's car because that's the one of the best I could ask for, in any game.. racing sim or sprawling RPG.

I was breaking down all the weapons I found for crafting mats but have since shifted to selling for money and that adds up. Plus all the hacking etc etc.

I just play the game, wander around, do whatever catches my fancy in the moment and not stress about the game lol Its fun

I do think that just everything about the vehicles is a byproduct. I've rarely seen a clumsier method than just spamming messages at you. So it would not surprise me if they also did not give a lot of consideration to their economy.

@efesell: I think the occasional gold necklace balances out with all the junk you scrap that you can sell for $8 a pop. That said I do think, like many things in this game, auto scrapping "valuables" is a real oversight and kind of strange it never came up in playtesting or wasn't fixed.

I'm at what I think is the final big decision point of the game and I'm torn on what to choose. That's the sign of a good story (at least for me) because if the story is bad I don't care about the decision. Gotta give them credit for that.

Also I have to admit that while I still have issues with some of Keanu's line reads and performance, when it comes time for him to be the emotional heart of the game he really does a good job. He is not so good at the raging asshole parts, but he's very good at the cynical bastard frenemy thing, which is really where his performance has to shine.

I've experienced a bunch of movement bugs, including sliding rapidly on inclines and sometimes losing the ability to jump (including during a plarforming mission...this game secretly has a lot of platforming. Fortunately a simple save, quit, restart fixed it.) It really is kind of a technical mess, but like Keanu's performance the core of the game really works in a lot of ways.

I am going to finish this tonight and then probably set it aside and do another playthrough after the next gen versions are out, and maybe some DLC drops. Possibly finish off some of the more interesting side quest lines in Act 3.

Unless it tanks hard at the very end my overall impressions of Cyberpunk 2077 are that it's a technical mess, has a lot of UI problems, a bad open world, but solid enough gameplay and good enough main mission design and story/characters to be an overall good game. Jeff said on the hotspot that if it had no technical issues it would be like a 4/5 in his book, and I think that's fair, but I also think that 5/5 would also be fair (if there were no technical issues) because good RPGs with compelling stories are rare and are also special.

I was surprised to learn that I had missed 2 potential ending paths, because I'm a perhaps overly thorough player in RPGs like this.

Although I contend that one of them is very badly designed and I fulfilled the spirit of what it wants but not the precise obtuse steps.

@sethmode: Haha yeah. It’s certainly not an end of the world type of bug, but I’m really sick of seeing these sorts of immersion breaking things pop up when I’m trying to enjoy the experience.

Also, since posting that last night, I’ve had at least one more hard crash. The game had decent autosaving, which helps, this is still inexcusable.

I've now finished the game. In typical Cyberpunk 2077 fashion I got some major bugs in the end. One was just a character who I was supposed to walk and talk with warping to the end point of the path so I couldn't hear anything they were saying. Fortunately I had subtitles on so I was able to follow the conversation through those. This game has so many issues like that I left subtitles on at all times even though going audio only would have been more immersive. Would have been pissed if I'd missed out on that stuff.

The second bug was more of a bummer. The final boss got stuck floating in midair just sort of standing there doing combat barks in the middle of what was kind of an engaging fight and I just ended up whaling on them until they fell down. That sucked but it was very Cyberpunk 2077. At least I got a taste for what the boss fight was supposed to be before it glitched out.

As for the ending itself...I don't want to do spoilers but it was not what I expected and I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. It certainly was a bold swing, and I think it implies a lot about what the game was supposed to be narratively but couldn't be because they just couldn't get the Mass Effect choice thing to happen. Maybe they will be able to in some DLC or a sequel.

A really good, atmospheric, linear RPG trapped in an open world game's body with a lot of bad glitches and design choices. Is it my favorite game of the year? Maybe. Probably not with how buggy it is. But if the game had worked and they had trimmed a lot of the open world fat (not taken away the open world but just not tried to give you so much boring stuff to do in it) and fixed the UI and other weird design choices it would probably be one of my favorite games ever. I loved the atmosphere, really liked the story and characters, and enjoyed the gameplay well enough.

Gonna be thinking about this one for a long time. Am I glad I played it at the buggy launch instead of waiting until it worked? I don't think so. But at least it made for an interesting experience. If they fix it I might try to play through it again, except the first play through took 45 hours and even if I skip the side stuff I don't like I'm not sure I want to invest that much time into a game that's so linear again. Not really like you can go back through a "renegade" playthrough like you can with Mass Effect.

I do have a save right before some important ending branches, though, and I will be checking those out over the next few days.

Just popping in here to say that CDPR fixed that save bug ahead of schedule. Apparently it was a file size limit? Hotfix 1.06 is live. I updated the OP with the news.

This has happened to me like 3 times already, including in one early fight that should have been amazing but just turned out to be goofy as hell. The boss enemy was stuck AND the dude helping me was stuck half inside of him, and both were just screaming lines over and over. On top of that, it actually was somewhat tricky to hit the enemy, because the reticle also kept picking up my ally as he twitched about.

That really sucks about the boss fights breaking. I guess I'm only going to go a little further and probably hold off on finishing the last act until I hear better news post big patches. I had my first boss like fight when you go the GIM after meeting the Voodoo Boys and that turned out OK. Game still has been relatively stable apart from occasional floating objects. The biggest thing that forced me to reload was during a Johnny shootout sequence where there's a guitar riff that plays during a staged riot before Johnny storms the Arasaka building to find Alt and the guitar riff just kept going forever during gameplay.

Story continues to get more engaging as I go on so it's a bummer that I'll have to eventually but this on the back burner soon.

Definitely had to do some save/reload to fix issues (Temp UI not going away, guns not firing) and a few crashes and invisible (but unimportant) NPCs. But aside from that, I am having a real good time with the game on PS4 Pro. Doing a biker looking Nomad-Hacker type aiming at only having guns for when things go south (which admittedly is all the time so far). I have not even reached the title card or done the first big mission but I just cant help exploring the first part of the city doing side stuff because it’s checking all of my boxes for what I want to do. And unless I really grow tired of the game at some point I am already considering a melee (katana specifically) Corpo build for a next character. We’ll see, but early impression for me is all glowing.. bugs aside.

I'm enjoying it more and more as I play. I'm about 20 hours in now. I really liked Act 1, despite some gripes, but didn't really like the start of Act 2, in part because I played some side missions I didn't like. But I've been on a string of missions, side and main, that I really like. And some of the gigs are fun for just mindless action. The action itself feels pretty good now that I have more abilities and better equipment. I'm also enjoying the writing more as well, again despite gripes. I suppose that's the thing; there is a lot to gripe about. But the number of gripes I have, right now, hasn't overwhelmed what I'm enjoying.

I just finished the game over the weekend. I think overall, I did enjoy my time with it more than I disliked it. I even played on a base PS4 and I really feel like too much of a fuss has been made about it being "unplayable", though I also feel that for a 2020 game the performance in unacceptable. But yeah I dunno. The story had some cool parts, I did a few neat side things, and the ending I got was fine I guess. But my big overall gripes that started at the beginning of the game stuck with me until the very end, which is that the voice acting and dialogue were all mostly bad, and the story as well as the side stories I did all tonally felt like they were done by stoned teenagers.

I've been confused about exactly why anything about this game could be hailed as a masterpiece, a term which I've seen bandied about by some friends as well as some critics that have opinions I value. Ok sure everybody has different tastes but wow there is no measuring stick that exists that I could use that would qualify anything about this game as a masterpiece to me. Or like that IGN review I keep thinking about which called this game a "mastercraft of storytelling." If I took off my glasses and squinted I could maybe make out that this game is a solid B+ or A- at best. But again. Everybody has different tastes.

@youeightit: I think that you can make an argument that the open world city design is a masterpiece, if you strip away the things you actually do in it. Yes it's hard to get to grips with moving around the city at first, which is true for a lot of real cities, but it's so densely packed with details and it feels incredibly real for a sci-fi city. The game can be extremely atmospheric in a way that a lot of games strive to be but most miss. When I think about the game what I think about is driving through the streets (even though the traffic is very badly modeled) with Resist and Disorder on the radio, feeling like a Merc in Night City. Then you get a dumb video call telling you to go do yet another shallow side mission.

I do think that the performances and dialogue of the major side characters (Panam, River, Judy) are better than average, and I even turned the corner on Keanu by the end and feel like his celebrity and persona really added to the Johnny Silverhand character more than some of the bad line readings took away. I noted, as Jeff did, that the game clearly had multiple recording sessions under different circumstances, which can make some of the dialog disjointed. You're not wrong about how juvenile it can be at times. But it has its moments and it has some memorable characters. The Peralez storyline is really memorable and, I think, well written.

@bigsocrates: yes absolutely about the city. I meant to mention the city in the post but it may be the coolest open world city I'v ever messed around in. I spent a lot of time walking around it just checking out buildings and weird walkways and things like that, not even driving. I also agree about some of the side characters and even coming around on Keanu. But again, I do think I just ultimately had a different takeaway from my time with it than others.

I also realize that I tend to play a lot of games for the narrative focus, for better or worse. I generally don't play games that don't have much of a story and I tend to play a lot of games. That being said, I do think my being more critical of the story than maybe some other people might just be because I might see a lot more video game stories than some other people. Or something.

@youeightit: I find it interesting that you say that you play a lot of story-based games and that's why you are so critical of Cyberpunk. I play a lot of story-based games and I think that's why I think it's above average. Compared to other media like movies and TV I'd be harsher.

Is it in the top echelon of story-based games like Hades? No. Is it even in the second or third tier like the Naughty Dog games or Final Fantasy Remake? No. But it's way above the majority of story-based games released every year. It doesn't have meaningful choices, a lot of the dialog is clunky, and the plot isn't anything special, but in an industry that churns out stuff like Immortals: Fenyx Rising, Watch Dogs: Legion, Genshin Impact, Marvel's Avengers and so many others at least Cyberpunk has some good characters and performances mixed in with the average stuff. I think the highs are pretty high and the lows are not that low. Is it a masterpiece? No. But it's solid.

Even compared to most RPGs it's pretty decent. It's much more narratively compelling than Skyrim (though that game does a lot of other stuff better) or the Tales Of games I played this year.

I think most video games have pretty bad stories. It's gotten better the last few years and the bar for average is rising, but I think Cyberpunk still clears it Watch Dogs 1 still exists. It's a piece of software out there right now. You can buy it, or get it along with the 'gold' edition of Legions. They still want people to play that thing!

@bigsocrates: Yeah, I dunno what to tell you except I agree with pretty much everything you said above and we just have a different opinion. But that's great, I think; and it says a lot in the game's favor that we're able to have a pretty lengthy and involved discussion about aspects of it like the story and that the conversations are worth having.

It does sound like I might not have properly communicated how I felt about the story. Simply put, I didn't hate it at all, there have been better and worse video game stories. But I really don't think the game, taken as a whole, all of it's parts in consideration, is a masterpiece. That's really all I felt I needed to say.

Hit about the 35 hour mark, this game is a mess but has really high highs, but I think they're too few and far between. Apologies for the incoming doctoral thesis.

The current general rule of thumb I'm working on is "any quest that finds you is good, any quest that you find is terrible". If someone calls you, you're probably in for a good quest with good writing, well-crafted encounters. If you run into a mission on the map, it's probably boilerplate filler garbage where you're just going to have to fight 7 dudes in a boring warehouse or whatever. Which, y'know, great, love to be actively disincentivized from exploring in an open world game.

I have really mixed feelings on the combat. I'm currently on Normal, and the game is just straight up too easy. I've handled the last few missions without drawing a gun, my Quickhacks are so good that they trivialize every encounter. However, when I bump the combat up, I end up running into what frankly feel like broken stealth mechanics: sight lines are weird and inconsistent and bad, the fact that an alerted enemy instantly alerts their entire network is extremely annoying, the enemy combat AI is.... just bad. The rules on what quickhacks trigger alerts feel inconsistent, and the rules on how enemies trace back to you after being attacked by quickhacks do too. Relying on all of those things to spice up combat is just as bad as it being too easy, but at least I clear the encounters quick.

Special shoutouts to fistfighting for just being straight up broken. As others have mentioned, the "damage they do in a punch v damage you do in a punch" mismatch is insane, but I'd also love to know if Rhino is out here firing ki blasts or something, because I swear I'm getting hit by punches from like 5-6 feet away.

The user interface on console is absolutely terrible. The menus are a pain in the ass to navigate, with no button shortcuts for several subheaders in the menu, making you reliant on the crappy little Destiny fake-mouse. Scrapping or selling items en-masse sucks (please for the love of god give me "mark as junk"). Managing shards and especially managing texts is an excruciating, half-baked process. There's one side job that makes you manually use a BD, and I spent five minutes trying to figure out where the hell it was before I eventually found it in my Junk.

The writing is extremely hit and miss. From the perspective of having control over the narrative progression of a main character, I don't think this is an RPG. V is as much a predefined character as Geralt is, and other than some minor quibbles about intonation you don't have any control over who V is or how they act. Despite that, I've been pulled this far into the game by some morsels of good writing in the better quests in the game. I think people expecting this game to deal in the larger conceptual themes and questions of cyberpunk as a genre will be disappointed, but I do think this game is using cyberpunk as an interesting set dressing for a more personal story about regret and coming to terms with your own mortality and lack of control over your own life, which I am enjoying. The incidental writing, and the moments where they do try to deal with cyberpunkier themes, is far more rough.

Lastly, I'm playing on PS5 at the moment (my gaming PC is at the shop getting some repairs done right now), and this thing runs like garbage. I have never closed this video game, it has only crashed, which it does approximately once every hour and a half. My movement gets bugged constantly and I am unable to run or get stuck on nothing. I am frequently unable to choose different dialogue options during a dialogue, like the cursor is stuck. The quickhack menu has about 60% odds of showing up when I highlight an enemy. This thing is busted.

Second night in a row I quit this game out of a combination of its broken bullshit exacerbating bad checkpointing and clunky combat.

Last night, some aggravating audio bug made it sound like my character had a plastic wind chime attached to his hip. As a person with misophonia (an irrational reaction to certain sounds), each step I took was pretty excruciating. Saving/loading didn't fix it, so I started rushing through the dungeon I was in to get through it, thinking it was just a bug in the area. But the rushing made me sloppy and so I ended up in a cycle of going through the same encounter over and over, getting slowly more irritable each time as the sound continued to drive me nuts.

Luckily a fresh boot this afternoon fixed the issue, and being able to think straight, I was able to cruise through the rest of that mission without any serious issues at all.

I continued to progress in the game today, doing a few side missions. Scripting got weird when one mission took me to a place where clearly another mission was also going to take me. I ended up getting in a conversation that I felt like I didn't have the context for at all, but the person seemed like a real scumbag so I dealt with them and then the cops got called on me. But I was on the other side of a locked door, and it sounded like they got in a fight with a bouncer or something outside. Honestly I have no fucking idea what was happening. I exited the area the way I snuck in and when notoriety cleared I got a mission complete thing. Whatever.

I decided I'd do those AI car missions since I was fucking sick of that dude calling me every single time I drove through a neighborhood. Did about three of them before one either got bugged or was just inscrutable. I think it was trying to make a Portal joke? Something about cake not being there and putting me through tests. The voice modulation made it next to impossible to follow because NPCs were screaming at me where that car decided to park. They started attacking me, which I thought was a bug. Before retrying the mission twice and realizing the car was sending them after me? Some grenade destroyed the AI car during that fight and I got warned that damaging the cars would terminate the contract. But the mission progressed even though the car was a blown out husk. It even jostled around after the mission ended.

I guess that fight triggered some nearby enemies because as the mission was trying to wrap up. The car was talking to me about something. Dialogue options kept popping up. But I was getting shot at from down the street, so I couldn't focus on the conversation. As soon as the mission complete thing ran, I killed the huge group of enemies I alerted. Looked like a big abandoned warehouse like every combat encounter in this game is, so I assume it's somewhere another mission would have/will take me. When I killed them I got a text saying my contract with the AI car dude was terminated because I did too much damage to the cars. Before I could even think to myself "good, I don't give a shit anymore" a turret with a wildly disproportionate strength to the other enemies in the area killed me.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a mess that just takes an opportunity at every fucking step to ensure you don't enjoy more than a few minutes of it. Every time I start getting excited about playing it, interested in its world or characters, or ready to experience the next bit of its narrative, some shit breaks and I have to figure out a way to play around the mess it made.

I've played for 16+ hours and the gameplay loop isn't great to me and not hooking me at all. The shooting isn't very good, the only time I liked the shooting was in the first Johnny flashback.

The driving might be the worst I've experienced in an open world game (GTA, Saints Row, Watch Dogs, etc. are better at it). The hacking is shallow and lame compared to Watch Dogs or Deus Ex. The dream dance stuff or whatever it's called is not fun nor cool. It's not really great at anything gameplay wise.

I'm playing on PC and haven't seen many bugs or had technical issues. I did see there are mods to make the driving better so I might try that. The economy is annoying since you pay to do a few missions rather than get paid yourself.

It kinda feels like Ubisoft or some other mid-level dev made a meh futuristic GTA that isn't particularly good at anything, has RPGish shooting, and tried to do too much.

My save is at about the 95 hour mark, character level 42 and Street Cred capped at 50

I reached a "point of no return" prompt in Act 3 so I proceeded to cancel out and button up any loose ends. It appears I've done every side job and I know I did a ton of the Gigs and misc other stuff around the city.. Maybe even most of them. I spent a bunch of time and money getting my gear setup, with mostly legendaries w/ some sick legendary mods, but with the ultimate goal being that my character didn't look like a complete idiot. Still isn't great but better than a neon green jumpsuit and an astronaut helmet.

While I think I could spend more time just hunting around for more legendary stuff (this is where the Diablo loot hook is), I think I'm about ready to finish it up. And it does feel like that, after this many weeks, I'm ready to move on. Game had some technical issues but this is always how "pc gaming" is IMO, and usually why I prefer playing stuff on my Playstation.

At the time of this post, Cyberpunk 2077 is at #4 on my GotY list. Sandwiched below Half-Life: Alyx and above FF7 Remake. I imagine it won't move from there unless the ending has a drastic effect on me.

I think I almost universally agree with your post (I'm also around 35 hours in), but this part in particular kind of blew my mind for how accurate it is. I think I found one quest so far that SEEMED interesting at first, and even that just ended up largely being "go to this location and kill the dudes."

Am I trippin' in thinking there's no flashlight or nigh vision in this game? I mean it's a future world full of cybernetics and yet I can't see in the darkness?

My bugs so far: (PC version playing on GOG)

- npc's spawning inside of other npc's

- vehicles spawning inside of other vehicles

- textures glitching and stretching across an entire room

- spawned into a room and wasn't able to move, had to reload

- found a enterable building that had no textures or collision meaning if you walk much more into into it you fall through the world, leading to reloading the game

- duplicates of objects being held by npc's being created and floating in the air for a long long time

- player clothing and hair disappearing

- vehicles floating about 1ft above the ground

- npc's mouths not moving when they talk

- weird shader/shade lines slowly covering the world, requiring a reload

- random slow downs in FPS for no reason, requiring a reload

- npc's walking through doors and vehicles when their path finding breaks

- general npc path finding being a complete joke and breaking a lot

welp that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

Before I go on, I am not here to defend the game's issues or speak praise for CDPR when/where it's not deserved, but I want to be honest. I am 54 hours into the game and still going through it. I want to do everything in the game, so it isn't short, and better yet, not short on great content. I am surprised because I think, through the many (although for me personally, minor) issues, it's probably my second favorite game of 2020.

The thing is, I am on the Xbox One X too, so I'm excited to try it on new-gen hardware when I can. I wish there were fewer to no bugs; I wish the frame rate was a bit steadier; inventory management less cumbersome; an option to customize cosmetics because V looks terrible almost always, and maybe the option to go prone. HDR needs work. The traffic density in streets is also unrealistically low/vacant at times (although, at times it makes sense and I prefer it), but like the other things I mention, it's all minor enough that they're not taking away from my experience, and I don't think them being fixed would change my opinion too much (but I hope they're fixed!)

There are too many individual minor issues to name, they just don't add up to making my experience anything less than great. I love the world through its sights and sounds, the gunplay and stealth are a whole lot of fun to me, and the characters and their stories are extraordinary. I hate the state of night city, but I feel it's deliberately immoral. What it's trying to say is a bit simplistic, but it works as well as I assume they were trying to make it. It does was it feels like it sets out to do for better or worse. Through the story though, it shows that there are still good and caring people which I appreciate, otherwise it all would become overbearing.

So yeah, I love it. It is basically what I would want out of a new Deus Ex. And although I don't condone the things CDPR has done, I am impressed with what they pulled off considering this is their first FPS. Going on foot 99 percent of the time, playing very hard, and doing all side quests helps the experience I think. I'd regret running right through the story. There's a lot of variety and detail in the environments taking into account the entire map. I'm doing all the missions that are considered medium and down, and some hard ones since not all of them require you to get into combat encounters.

My least favorite side missions so far have been the hand-to-hand fights. The fist fighting isn't great, and the fact the foes can take you out in one to three hits, while it takes about 20 for you to finish them is somewhat annoying. Sometimes the story and characters behind them are interesting though. I've learned to just strong punch them over and over; seems they have a hard time fighting back when I do that and there's a good chance they get knocked to the ground.

Lastly, for now, question: what did people make of the GLaDOS vehicle?

lmao, who is going for a refund?

Just finished it. No spoilers, but I think the sort of mid-game stuff with the major companion NPCs is easily the best stuff in the whole game. If I could have had my way, I would have cut eeeeeeeeevery fixer mission from the game because they're all the same and boring and forgettable, and added 4 or 5 more quest chains as good as those, or elevated some of the tertiary characters to that same status and given them major questlines.

I think this game is a core of really, really good writing, marred by a garbage first act, a looooooot of terrible open-world filler that shouldn't have been there, and thoughts about the ending that I've put in that thread.

I think Jeff nailed it on the head that the thing that 2077 can't nail is "trust"

I can't simjply "trust" the game to get me out of it's bugs in a way that doesn't destroy progress.

Im on PC with hotfix 1.06, and last night I hit a car while riding a motorbike which sent me and my bike flying separately. This was fine, except when I landed... the game somehow thought I was still ON the bike and now couldn't move and there was no input I could make (since I was no longer actually ON the bike) to "dismount" or get myself out of this state. Now, I have to reload to my last save, which was unfortuantely still in the middle of my last mission and auto-save didn't kick in once it was done.

Night before? I "Jacked in" to a info tower to get some money and stuff, totally usual thing but when the minigame ended, V's state never went into "exit" mode and just stood there... infinitely, arms out but with cord retracted.. unable to move or jump out of this state manually.

However.

This one wasn't game breaking but annoying all the same, a certain mission got me to "Follow the cables" but I had already been to the roof and found the thing they lead too using a normal path and without scamming the traversal system. Because this is an objective amongst other objectives for this mission, everytime I'd progress to a new objective a new objective would take it's place, but "Follow the Cables" would always just be there, unable to be fulfilled. But to the games "credit" I'm at least able to open the Journal and select the specific object I wish to complete so it didn't hinder progress, and the mission completed just fine when I was done. But I had to do Journal select thing every time because it'd just default back to the cable objective.

I was genuinely afraid I wouldn't be able to finish this mission without "completing" the "Follow the Cables" objective. But thankfully it did.

I have to save-scum every minute or so with F5 just to make sure whatever fuckery happens doesn't make me have to restart from too far back.

It seems the biggest issue with this game is it's implementation of Event Dispatching. Either the dispatched event is a. not firing properly, b. getting dropped (due to frame skipping perhaps?) or c. listeners for those events are failign to subscribe, or d. all of the above, they NEED to figure that shit out before its way too late.