(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.