No idea where you're getting "Far Cry clone" from and it's definitely an RPG. That's pretty obvious especially from the recent 15 minute video and the fact the devs have said so numerous times over the years. As I previously stated you guys are drawing conclusions based off nothing i.e you saying it'll have limited custom options, and 20 hours long. I highly doubt a game that's taken nearly a decade to make is going to be limited and have such a short campaign. With everything it'll probably be more like 100+ hours.
You are not facing reality.
The game has, according to the developers, gone through multiple builds. CDPR is still a relatively small studio compared to something like Bioware or Bethesda, which means it can't run concurrent large projects. Those builds were probably small and limited in scope while the rights to the PnP were still being worked out.
Then they decided on the current iteration. The footage at EA 2018 was pre-alpha footage, a bullshot of what "could" be the game. A lot of what you saw in that original gameplay video has been removed, judging by the most recent gameplay, so it likely wasn't running on an alpha build of the game either, but a specially-built demo produced exclusively for E3 2018.
So, they most likely didn't have a working alpha build of the final game as late as August 2018. I'll be generous and say that they recorded that tech demo earlier in the year, so let's say they were working on an alpha as early as June of last year.
As an example, the original
Mass Effect began production in early 2004. It was released in 2007. So, a three year development cycle for a game that clocked in at around 40ish hours if you do everything.
The core mechanics of Cyberpunk 2077 have only been worked on for a little over a year. They have seven months left, and they won't work on major features up to the wire, but let's be really generous and say 2 years.
If they had decided to use the same engine and assets from The Witcher (rigging, character skeletons, some animations, etc) then I would agree that the game could be at around 80 hours of content in two years of development. However, they are doing a complete departure from The Witcher - they are making a FPS, which they have never made before, with all new assets.
In two years.
There is no way this game is going to be 100+ hours. There's very little chance it will be more than 40. They are cutting things left and right (character backstories beyond the three we saw at E3, jobs like in the PnP, third-person cinematic cutscenes which constitute an enormous undertaking in a new engine because they have to adapt their old synching and modeling randomizer programs, or build new ones from scratch, and etc.).
That's where I'm getting my 20ish hours from. They don't have the time. It takes years to make a proper RPG. Far Cry 5, however, only took about a
year for Ubisoft to make, start to finish. That's the type of game that this is looking to be.