I will share my experience... I played the game the week it launched on PC. Played a few hours, forgot about it.
Came back to it this week, started fresh. It really is phenomenal. The story is incredible. So much so, that I find myself doing ANYTHING to keep the game going without progressing. The little side quests I do are so engrossing, I forget they're not part of the main story line. I played for hours and was blown away before the words "cyberpunk 2077" scrolled across the screen and I realized I had only completed the intro.
It really is a wonderful world that feels alive. I feel like the builds are fun and actually feel rewarded for trying new things. (I was a hardcore wow player where min maxing was so essential. It's so refreshing to play a single player game where I can actually fuck around and try to new/different things).
So yeah. The game didn't grab me the first time. Second time around and it's easily in my top 10.
I played it on Xbox when it first came out. There definitely were a ton of bugs and issues, but I loved the story so much that I kept with it and it got better with each patch. Once I finish Zelda Iโm going to replay it again.
The game is in a much better state now than when it first launched. And the open world is pretty gorgeous! Occasionally I'll boot up the game, hop on a motorcycle, turn on the radio, and just cruise around the city without a goal in mind. Very fun environments to explore, and I'll often end up catching myself finding little spots that I've never seen before, even after completing all the main and side quests.
The game is so good. But I might be biased because I enjoyed the game since day 1.
How open world is everything?
For me there's a lot to explore, some corners tells a story of what happened there even though you can't see any shards that you can read what happened, you can see some traces of what went through and that for me is what made the city alive. (People pointed out that the city is dead because NPCs don't have daily routines/cycles and they are dumb)
Maybe I am just easy to please.
Anyways, some doors are locked for obvious performance reasons.
(People pointed out that the city is dead because NPCs donโt have daily routines/cycles and they are dumb)
The issue is mainly that they (and the city overall) don't really react in a way that has been established by open world city games since like... GTA3?
NPCs didn't have a range of reactions to aggression or being bumped, they wouldn't start fights, some of the seated ones wouldn't even run away when gunfire goes off nearby they'd just stay seated and scream. The police system was obviously hellishly bad with cops just teleporting in to fight you, no chase/escape gameplay, no real anything.
The sandbox basically fails to deliver standard features of the open world city sandbox that have existed in every open world city game for 15 years.
The story content is good, and plays really well. The issue is that the world and interacting with it functionally feels like a diorama that you're not supposed to touch. Like a background in a movie where the walls will fall over if you touch them.
Compare to how the world interacts with the player in GTA5 or RDR2 and it's massively underwhelming, which is what people were expecting in terms of quality and polish. It's a real shame because the game is gorgeous and tonnes of effort clearly went into its world and story. I personally have some other issues with it, like the "punk" aspect not really being present because half the studio are far-right PiS voters but it's a Polish studio so I expected that. Trigger really demonstrated how this franchise should look when you handle it from the properly left-wing "punk" angle that the cyberpunk genre is supposed to have, fully committing with no both-sides or confusion about it.
Yep, I get all of that. Encountered some of that specially the police but it didnt really bothered me much since I also hated police chase since GTA 3. I had fun with the NPC reactions specially day 1 patches because I will scare them then chase them and switch to photomode to capture the moment like a maniac. Lol
The set-up pieces on corners of Night city, like diorama as you said is what I appreciated. Maybe it's just me but I really liked it.
I think there's so much more you can do with the setting and the sandbox though. The basics of a city sandbox involve the police, fire and ambulance response to problems in the city.
There should be private fire crews, and they should compete with each other. Fires that break out should have multiple private fire companies come out to them and compete for putting out the fire. This should turn into a disaster obviously because they just shoot the shit out of each other.
Ambulance teams should obviously be Trauma Team. The scene where you hand over the woman from the bathtub to Trauma Team should have been the way they work ALWAYS. They should be scary heavily geared medics that don't fuck around about killing you to save some corpo you've injured, they should show up before the police in cases of corpos because Trauma Team are more efficient than the cops, and not over-stretched.
The cops should have a real chase system, and show significantly more signs of being overstretched in the city.
Areas of the world should react realistically to player inputs, rather than feeling like a diorama they should feel like living spaces.
If these had been nailed properly along with modtools the modscene for the game could have been better than Skyrim. Especially with all the locked doors everywhere for modders to add content with.
On the non-technical side of things. I find CDPR's cyberpunk to be a little confused. Sometimes it doesn't remember that this world is hell and it goes to "coool futureeeee", effectively having the aesthetic trappings of the genre but trying to pretend that the world is good and likeable. Trigger's show on the other hand is never confused about the world, it's a living hell that nobody should ever admire or think is cool and it never strays from that. This isn't really very surprising given that everyone working at Trigger is a communist though lmao. You can see the difference between half of CDPR being right wing who actually admire this future libertarian hell city vs Trigger's studio full of commies.
I don't see your PiS angle at all. Night City is pretty faithful to Mike Pondsmith's vision, and if he didn't think so, he wouldn't be spreading conspiracy theories on Morrow Rock.
I was playing the game 20 years ago it is absolutely not. This is obviously explainable by the fact that half of Poland are literally fascists these days and anyone in europe understands that.
I have to disagree heavily. RDR2, and GTA5 are completely unreactive and uncaring of the player. That's been my problem with all Rockstar games from the start.
The closest thing to reactive stuff in RDR2 is the goddamn annoying timer that looks at "how long since last player interaction" and if it's been too long, it'll throw at you one of a ten or so random events (woman with a horse, prison escape, etc) to make sure you are engaged.
Rockstar have this thing with their games, there is lots of freedom to do shit that doesn't matter, and there is a B movie inside the game. Never shall the two meet. The gameplay is doing random shit in GTA, and the story is extremely fixed missions with very specific actions you do as you play through this B movie.
Other than progressing the plot, nothing changes in the world. Nothing you do in Rockstar games matter, unless it happens inside this B movie.
I mean, isn't this like something that Rockstar was criticized for like ten years ago? Cyberpunk 2077 is not as reactive as you'd like, but it's at least on par with Rockstar games.
Whether the NPCs react as well, I can't really argue about since I don't remember GTA, et al, well enough.
Add in your take on the political leanings of several hundred strong company en masse, and I'm not sure if your take has a lot of points worth the read.
Cyberpunk 2077 is not as reactive as youโd like, but itโs at least on par with Rockstar games.
Wtf, have you actually played both? Like at all? This statement is utterly absurd. The walking NPCs in Cyberpunk literally despawn as soon as you look in the opposite direction to them and then turn back, you can not be serious.
I posted another comment in the thread, but yes, very much worth it in my opinion. There's plenty of playthrough footage that'd help you figure out if you would like the play styles (melee brute, ranged sniper, close combat gunner, netrunner to name a few and any mix you can think of)
You might want to wait for a sale though, I'd expect one close or at release of phantom liberty, which is also going to coincide with a patch that massively changes the base game.
At this point itโs legit very good. However, if youโve waited this long you might as well wait a few more months for phantom liberty to come out as theyโre overhauling a lot of the core game to make it even better.
I got the game very early on. Even bought a pc for it. Was glorious. Actually, I had less bugs before they โfixedโ everything but its not a lot now.
Think gta in the future. Cool story, insane graphics. Only downside is that you have to start with the story and it feels kind of long until you really get out there. After that youโre free and can do everything else before advancing the story, finishing the game.
I played through three times I think. The different fighting styles are very cool as well. Completely different gameplay. I.e. hacker, mantis, rambo, double 0 agent, etc.
So is it worth 60 bucks? If you love the theme as much as I do then yes. But otherwise it is a must for 30, definitely.
A couple people have said there's a significant core patch coming out in tandem with phantom liberty, so I'm going to look into that and see if it's worth waiting a few months. I'm a patient gamer anyway