The reports I hear is that they're a highly, highly sought after studio.
Maybe you have some fresh verified insider info you'd like to share?
Yeah, the game just screams mediocrity!
Crunch is proof of mediocrity?
That's a novel one.
I'll go through from top to bottom.
I never said they are a bad studio.
I said people believe those companies are unfailable. Kojima made MGS, and he was very good at this genre, there is nothing to talk down there, just as CDPR did a very very good job on most of the Witcher Series with a few hiccups here and there but still above the average game dev back then. But my point is, they're not doing a Fantasy-Middle-Age RPG this time. This is Cyberpunk, a completely different genre that needs completely different game mechanics and has a world that works in a fundamentally different way. Yes CDPR has a very good chance in succeeding and delivering a game that holds up to their name, but that is not a guarantee.
Wall running? Canceled.
Multiplayer? Taken out of the game and will now release 2021.
First it was "no MTX", now we're at "no MTX for SP but MP will have some sort of it". This backpaddling is also a negative sign.
Gunplay looks quite shallow compared to other Shooters out there, which is a shame really.
Early on, the possibility to approach a issue in different ways was heavily advertised, from the demos I've seen at GC etc. they really dumped that down and it's usually either Guns blazing or "stealth" that ends with Guns blazing.
And those issues are not just seen by me but also by some of the media out there, forums etc.
Game gets delayed 3x and pushed back over a year while showing off the very same section of the game as "proof of progression" for most of its time on top of that.
Like I said it can still turn out to be a great game but for me this all looks watered down because back in the day before the very first delay they were optimistic and the further down the delay-chain you go, the more and more things get shafted under the rug and taken out of the game to not have to delay the game again.
Also, "crunch" is proof of bad time management. The excuse "but everyone does it!" is not valid. If everyone would be jumping off a bridge, would you say it can't be that bad because everyone is doing it?
It's mental to handwave crunch away. "Luckily" crunch usually happens at the very end of development when the final deadline approaches, but with CP2077, you've heard talks of crunch as early as January 2020 where they admitted there will be crunch.