I am now 25 hours in, and have gotten through a large chunk of the story.
In those hours, I have:
* Upgraded my cyberware twice
* Crafted a thing once
* Actually engaged with the perk system never (I did put points into things, but neither my playstyle nor my experience of the game actually changed)
This is really bad for a game as big as this. It speaks to development ressources being spent on systems for the sake of having systems, with no real game design or mission balancing going on.
As for the story...
I think I have a handle on the themes now. Everyone in Night City is lonely and miserable; Night City takes your dreams and spits them in your face. V wishes to be a legend, the best; Night City makes sure they are by putting a legend in their head that is slowly but surely killing them.
The thing is .... this is presented with a weird sort of indifference. Yeah, there's Johnny Silverhand ranting about burning the city down, but he is literally trapped in its systems of power; he rebels against being a puppet, but he's just a tool like everyone else. V (depending on how you play them) can care about people, but can't actually do anything about their misery; There is no revolution at the end of the tunnel, just a struggle for survival against the onrushing train.
There are still neat and weird bits in there that make this game interesting to play, its world interesting to experience. But, at the end of the day, I don't think this game has a whole lot to say for itself. It's at the same time overly ambitious in its tech and not ambitious enough in its writing; where Rockstar took the canvas of Red Dead and spun an epic morality tale where every single scene was infused with that game's themes, Cyberpunk ends up as a portrayal of life in a dystopian, careless future -- and with no real energy behind its protesting of this dystopia.
Except of course if the point is that no one cares about protesting the horrible world they live in.
Hence the juxtapose between the "terrorist" Johnny Silverhands who hated the entire corporate world with a passion and V who starts out pleased to finally make it into the big leagues.[/quote]
The point were someone who hasn't even played the game thinks they can comment on it, is the point where I decide there's little worth listening to in their comment.
The memes I've made or spread have also been mocking the technical bugs cause they are ****ing funny! The game might be buggy as hell but I'm absolutely loving it. I'm not spreading positive stuff cause it would be massively full of spoilers. And this game should be experienced, not talked about. There are plenty of missions with as much if not more depth than stuff in Witcher 3 The second missions with the married politicians or with River are both missions which I started playing a little late and then kept me glued to the game far later than I planed to stay up playing it.
I honestly have no idea what game The E is playing but given that he isn't interested in modding his character, he might actually be completely the wrong audience for this game. First thing I did was give myself mantis blades and high jumping ability and bound along the rooftops as a new breed of superhero. I'm not here to play shiny GTA. I'm here to mod the hell out of my character like you should in a cyberpunk game.
(in response to luis)
Don't get me wrong, for all that I am criticizing this game, there still are good things to find in here. The characters are very well written and drawn, and there are some stories in here that are good fun.
But those things can't hold up a game that is plagued by this many issues, both in terms of genuine bugs and baffling design missteps. It kinda reminds me of Dontnod's Remember Me: It, too, promised a lot and delivered not a whole lot (Although it has to be said that Remember Me was probably a more successful game in terms of what it wanted to be vs what it actually turned out to be than Cyberpunk is).
I don't wish CDPR ill, I really don't. But a release this bad, this outright deceptive should absolutely be taken as a springboard to question these notions of them being a "good" developer, a "gamer's first" developer, cos this game is about as broken on about as many levels as Mass Effect Andromeda was, and last I checked we haven't forgiven Bioware for that yet, have we.
The second missions with the married politicians or with River are both missions which I started playing a little late and then kept me glued to the game far later than I planed to stay up playing it.
These are absolutely highlights of the game. They're great missions, great stories!
They should just be in a better game.
I honestly have no idea what game The E is playing but given that he isn't interested in modding his character, he might actually be completely the wrong audience for this game. First thing I did was give myself mantis blades and high jumping ability and bound along the rooftops as a new breed of superhero.
Okay, that's cool. One question though: Did that open up any gameplay routes for you that weren't open before?
With upgrades like that, I would expect the mission design and level design to take them into account, to reward you for making that investment in some way. If I spec into wall-punching in Deus Ex, I know I'll be getting access to a bunch of routes I wasn't able to get to before; Does installing a high jump mod do the same here? Not to the best of my knowledge.
My complaint here is that the game is terrible about communicating the benefits of a given upgrade. Everything in it, every single encounter, is balanced around the player doing nothing but the bare minimum required to invest in these systems (that the AI is terrible and frequently glitches out or doesn't react to your presence at all does not help); as a result, the only reason to invest in these systems is for the cool factor of "my arms are katanas now".
I'm absolutely interested in modding characters, that's always cool to do, but doing so here doesn't convey much beyond pure self-actualization. I would like some game design to go with my upgrades, basically.
As for me being the wrong audience for this game: Please. I absolutely love myself a huge slab of open world game with good writing. I fundamentally like Cyberpunk 2077 despite all its faults, I do not regret buying or playing it, and I am interested in seeing what CDPR are going to do with it in the future.
I just feel that it could have been much better, and that its faults show a .... carelessness in game design that other studios operating in roughly the same realm have done a much better job with than CDPR did here.