I agree and stated all of that in my original comparison, they aren't even trying to be the same game. However I will stand by my original point and why I bought up disco elysium (I was asked to state an RPG that I thought did have meaningful choices and consequences) - cyberpunk is very weak when assessed from the perspective of "being an RPG".
And that's where the fundamental issue lies for me, if its weak as an RPG then what exactly is it? As an open world game it's weak - this is well documented.
So where does that leave us? The story is good if you accept the fact that it's on rails. The cutscenes (and animation work within them) and acting are some of the best we've seen in the medium. The combat can be fun but that's let down by poor ai.
It's basically an action adventure game that really didn't need to be open world.
Which is the reason for my post, and reference to Deus Ex. Deus Ex isn't a first person shooter. Deus Ex isn't a role playing game. Deus Ex isn't a stealth game. It's an immersive sim with shooter, RPG, and stealth
elements that add to the whole.The hope of its developers was that, in concert, these elements would produce something that was more than the straight sum of its parts. In isolation, each element is actually kind of terrible. Deus Ex is a terrible shooter. Its RPG systems are really bare-bone, bordering on neolithic. It's stealth is rudimentary to say the least. But that the player can chose to operate in any of these systems at their sole discretion is what creates Deus Ex's brand of role play. In this regards, Cyberpunk is the same, and Warren Spector's worst fears for Deus Ex were realised: people are comparing its elements in isolation.
As an RPG, Cyberpunk is actually quite brilliant, but still not good enough to stand up when considering "just an RPG". My V is an ex-corpo. They're a selfish bastard out for eddies, but that has a flip side: they defend their own to the death. Mess with V's friends, and the gloves come off. When completing missions, my V is all business. If you're my assassination target, I'll let everyone but you live. But, offer more eddies to let you live than I was paid to kill you, we're cool - I'll take the eddies, you can skip town. In addition to this, my V has max cool and intelligence stats. I use a pistol when I absolutely have to, but I prefer to go the corpo-rat route and hack from the shadows. As I'm playing Cyberpunk, I'm constantly inventing my story, enacting its elements within the deep world of Night City. Instead of cutscenes
telling me what I care about, I can pick and chose, filling out my story and my back story as I want. I get to actually
role play, instead of relying on the game to tell me who and what I am.
Cyberpunk is not an "open world game", defined as a player-agnostic systems driven game, but the developers were clear that that was not their intention long before the game came out. What the open game world still offers, though, is immersion and freedom. I can approach missions however I want, owing to the freedom of the open world. Climb a neighboring building and enter from above, hit the water ways and come up through a grate, drive a car through the front fucking doors and go John Wick mode; the open world provides options to extend the mission and gameplay variety. As for immersion, well, in my opinion Night City is simply the most immersive open world I've ever played. GTA hasn't really impressed me since GTA San Andreas. I found Sleeping Dog's Hong Kong to be a dramatically more interesting place to occupy than GTA V's San Andreas, so I might be in the minority here. The context, feeling, and depth that Night City brings to the entire Cyberpunk experience offers tendrils that inform my role play in a way that no other game really has that I can remember. Is it completely necessary? No, so you're definitely right in that element - but again, like Deus Ex, I believe it's more than the straight sum of its parts. Without the open world, Cyberpunk would be dramatically less effecting.
It's not an action adventure game. It's an immersive sim with shooter, rpg, stealth, hacking, and open world elements. The closest straight comparison for my money would be "an open world Bioshock with RPG elements".
www.cdprojekt.com
