On the subject of the performance issues:
The promise of a game company to sell something on hardware that can't properly run it is fucked. CDPR should not be defended in this regard because not only did they NOT let reviewers use console review codes, they made them use prebaked footage for reviews, extremely limiting the press and review information that could be provided to the public. When millions of people bought it for a console they were advertised would work...I don't see how that's remotely pro consumer and why that's defensible in the slightest, especially when other games made longer ago look great on the hardware.
On the game itself:
In a game about "customizing your body and everything" it's baffling how little customization choices there are. You can't even change your hair after starting the game? You can't put scopes or silencers on most the guns? You can't change the skins on guns you craft? You can't upgrade certain weapons to certain levels but you can upgrade others? TPosing everywhere? Doing a Ping scan to hit the devices in an area can tank the framerate? A replicateable bug where I use a short circuit on an enemy in an area that tanks the framerate consistently in one part of the game? Just opening the map has caused an unable to exit forcing me to close at least 4 times? Your "cyber enhancements" being mostly tiny stat changes and not major gameplay changes minus Berserk, and 3-4 others? The fact that romance options are limited by Gender AND Voice? The fact that for a "mature" title you can only do limited things in the world in regards to sex, and its treatment of sex in general being pretty juvenile 90% of the time? The fact that regardless of your opening choice of background 90% of the gameplay is just based around being a street kid?
There's so many things "missing" from the game that are kinda weird. Things like augmentations that are in the cyberpunk 2020 rules but not in the game, augmentations and things that are locked behind tiny incremental changes, characters and NPCs that are "allowed" to look more cyber enhanced than you can, and strange decisions on when you can openly affect quest progression vs when you can't. Hell you can't even make your skin look prosthetic or plastic-y like some of the characters in the game or properly morph your facial geometry despite it being almost exclusively in first person.
I think Cyberpunk is a remarkable set of really great ideas executed poorly, but when it comes to anything beyond the basic shooting the game is horribly balanced, (like cyberhacking being OP as hell) or just half baked (Crafting system being nonsense). It's not just about "game killing bugs" of which I've had only about a dozen crashes, it's about the scale and mechanical depth of the game. It's about how basic functions like car AI and such is really bad at times. It's about how un-optomized the game is.
That being said...
I'm pretty much split right down the middle on Cyberpunk 2077 after about 60-70 hours so far.
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PROS:
1. Excellent gameplay/gunplay.
Really smooth feeling and smart weapons are fun and being able to be "non-lethal" in the game is interesting albeit underdeveloped in the game. Hacking is OP but fun to do, hopping into a camera to hop into a computer to hack a guy is neat.
2. Passive Storytelling.
There's a lot of subtle hints and reminders that the world is truly connected as you scan people's emails and computers and personal logs and find characters related to each other and/or coordinating with each other, sometimes against YOU the player. If a character quest is failed in one regard you can literally find them with "cement shoes" at the bottom of a lake and there's no quest marker there, it's organic and linked to exploration.
3. SOME SideQuests
There's some sidequests that remind me this is a CDPR game and truly help flesh out the world that they're in. Things like playing a VR game with headsets where little children appear as adults but have kid voices impersonating bad action flicks juxtaposed against the terrible darkness of humanity in a world like Cyberpunk making underground "BDs" like dark net/snuff video content helps round out the world a bit, I just wish there was more of this.
4. Voice Acting
Aside from Keanu Reeves who feels phoned in half the time and the other half almost sounds like a nicholas cage impression that I can't unhear now, majority of the acting is solid. V's male voice was grating to me at first but there are several moments in the story and sidequests where the actor really gets into the performance and does extremely well.
5. Music
Some of the music is grating but majority of it is good. It's a bummer that you either have radio or nothing for a majority of the game because the regular synth music that plays during missions is great. The only real grating one I've heard so far is the "not Doom" music one that pops up in combat encounters where I'm just like "okay calm down I'm over it" after the first 5 minutes. Also the cute anime pop music talking about wanting to get banged is hilarious.
6. Lethality vs Non-Lethality
There's lots of quests that go "Go kill this guy" and while you can only question a few of them, you have a ton of options of how to go about handling them. You can mod your weapons to be "non-lethal" meaning you decrease their HP but they live afterwards (but if you shoot them after they're down it counts as a kill). You can then shoot the guy to neutralize him and take him out to the fixer's car. They'll even comment on you not wanting to do "the dirty work" which I think is neat.
7. World Design
There's several great places to go in Night City and varied environments that sometimes look downright gorgeous. Several varieties of ecosystems and locations from the badlands to japantown to pacifica etc. There's so much cool shit to go look at, which is why it's a bummer that the cars disappear/reappear, npcs are lacking in interactivity, and you can't interact with things in the world like the game machines, pachinko, clubs, etc.
CONS:
1. Linearity vs Open Ended-ness
There's some sidequests that are little more than killing a single dude or grabbing him and throwing him into the back of a car that are more open than main story quests.
Typically the story/companion quests boil down to "follow a person walking slow, get in car, stand in for your typical Fast and the Furious or GTA mission prompt with a bit of a twist, kill dudes or sneak, get out." Whereas some sidequests allow you to choose a bunch of different methods to the same end, the main quest line gives you the illusion of "options" but ultimately mean very little in the grand scheme of the conversation. (I'd know because I've replayed through several convos and very little changes depending on your retorts).
One Sidequest has you taking down someone who's selling military equipment to civilians but if you stun them you find a conversation that someone is blackmailing them by sending them fingers of a family member or loved one and making them do it. You cannot act on this in any way that I've been able to find.
2. Romance
How is it still after all these years Bioware/Mass Effect remain the kings of Romance/companions in video games?? An entire game about modding your body and doing what you want in a supposedly "mature" setting and the list of people you can romance is:
-2 if you're a guy
-2 if you're a girl
-4 prostitutes you can sleep with
And that's it. Not only that but despite them having things to do in the endings and later quests of the game, you can't do literally anything with your romantic partner or even bring them up when asked.
You romance someone and then you never talk to them again, despite getting a house/apartment in their location you can go to. Missed potential here to spend time with the person and/or add more dialogue to them beyond "You banged them, you got what you want, move on."
And it's baffling that we STILL have genderlocked romances in a title like this.
3. Nonsense Writing at times
There's entire subquests and storylines that kind of just get added for shock value and then you don't follow any threads for them (or any that I've seen so far).
One questline has you getting a comatose serial killer to "dream" so you can draw conclusions about where he might have lived as a kid, which turns out to be a farm where they're doing "something" to the kids he's tricking into going there. He's just "pumping them full of hormones" and that's the end of the plot line. No real clarification on if he was actually doing anything or just sick or what the reason behind it was. We just move on.
There's also several key moments where characters forget things you mentioned to them before or told them before and/or act like never happened, including shifting tones of conversations/dialogue that don't fit. Which is odd considering how many small triggers there are elsewhere that actually factor in previous convos and such.
4. Bugs in the Engine
Things like loading a save file later during a stealth run and having every enemy still be alerted to your presence because of the buggy stealth mechanics is annoying. Getting locked in the map menu and not able to continue without restarting the game and losing progress is annoying. Audio bugs where characters start talking as if they're on comms when they're sitting right next to me are annoying. There's just a lot of little things that add up.
5. Broken Systems
Crafting is busted. Hacking is busted. Clothing and economy and shops in general are busted.
Crafting - You can't customize your weapons in terms of skin and can't do much with weapons behind tiny things like "+7 damage" and/or add a scope on them. Only like 2 weapon types have silencers, some can't have scopes (why would you put a sniper rifle in a game and then have it be unable to be used at long range without a scope???) and god forbid you want to mod a specific "color" or look of a gun without hunting for one.
Hacking - You can basically solve an entire mission before you walk through the door. While it's cool it's this open, I don't understand why they'd make hacking so OP. All you need is contagion, Protocol Breach, and short circuit and some mods and you can pretty much wipe out an entire room without setting foot through it. The mods themselves are cool but I don't feel the game is really balanced around it.
Clothing - God forbid you want to look a certain way because there is no glamour system in the game, forcing you to sometimes look like a hobo to get decent enough stats. Clothing of certain types can be upgraded far more than clothing with "mod slots" meaning that you can buff certain items or store bought items further than you can even mod your crafted items, making crafted items almost useless for their costs due to the loot economy in the game and how things drop for you. Again just like guns you can't change skins, colors, etc on clothing so you get what you get and hope that the stores eventually carry the thing you want to wear.
If this was to encourage people coming back to the stores they shouldn't have made the walk/drive to Quick travel points such a long dredge to get to.
6. Customization
You can't customize your character's visuals at all after the start of the game. Despite the emphasis and barraging of Mirrors everywhere and photo mode, you can't change anything after the initial character creation and the cyberware alters your look very little. I get wanting to make sure "clothes" look right but the fact that there's a cyberpunk game with so many body types and looks but you have to be a basic ass human for the most part in terms of visual is a real bummer. This is combined with the aforementioned lack of customization options on guns, clothes, and even vehicles can't get a new paint job??
7. Cast Limits
The cast is extremely small and not interesting enough to carry the story. Takemura and Panam are great, but characters like River are kinda the bog standard Vin Diesel character with not a lot of meat to their motivations or character interactions.
Combine this with the previously mentioned romantic limits and you get a game that forces you to talk almost exclusively to Keanu's Johnny Silverhand which is fine most the time but gets grating when you feel like you talk to Fixers more than the people who are supposed to "have you back" and care about you more than others and who you've helped.
The cast is too small to carry a game this big and there's too few things you can do with them to compensate for the small cast.
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There's oddities like the fact that they have a rocket launcher in a mission but no heavy ordinance available to the player, lack of augmentations that really have meaningful gameplay changes, etc. But I can't say I hate all my time with the game in the slightest. And I think that's what bums me out the most.
There's a pile of missed potential here for a game that had 8+ years to develop. There's a lot of ideas that are well thought up but poorly executed. There's a ton of great nuggets of CDPR goodness that pop up here and there but then you get drug out of it later.
It's a shame that a game like this is more of an iteration on things we've already seen vs a real change in the way these types of games are handled. I know some people would say expectations were too high and maybe CDPR just overshot their ambition a bit. Either way I wished they'd gotten to "finish" the game before releasing because it could have been a GOTG. Right now it's just "good." Which is "fine" and I'd recommend buying it WAY later after the kinks are ironed out, but I can't say I didn't expect/want more after playing Witcher 3.
The game could have been a really huge deal, but as of now it's just a first person GTA that has Bethesda level bugs, and from CDPR and a title that delayed itself this many times to come out, I expected something "more." I had hoped for more. Partly that's on me, but I hope CDPR learns to keep things within their scope moving forward instead of promising the world and then under-delivering.
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Bit_Reactor
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