After like 8 hours I have strongly mixed feelings about this game, the marketing campaign and how I am supposed to feel about CDPR.
First off, I don't hate the game by any means. But I am flabbergasted and kind of disappointed by the state this game was released in. I mean, who decided that this is in any shape or form acceptable to release and take money from people? I basically pre-ordered an early access game. And a broken one at that.
I'm usually quit lucky with day-one-bugs in games. A few minor graphical glitches here and there, sure. No problemo. But this is beyond what is acceptable, because it completely breaks any kind of immersion.
It took like 10 seconds to encounter my first issue. It was literally the first interaction after the character creation that bugged out. Since then I think I hardly played a minute without any weird glitch, pop-in or texture loading failure.
I play on an xbox one x, and the performance is abysmal! I did not measure it, of course, but I think the frames drop to like 10-12 fps while driving or walking around in heavily lit environments. Some times the entire screen freezes for a few seconds, leaving me there, hoping that it won't crash this time. Talking about crashes, the game crashed like 6 times during this 8 hours. I did not have so many crashes in all games on the xbox over the last 15 year combined! (Almost). I think the worst game was AC:Unity that crashed like two times, back in the days.
Don't know if anybody noticed this, but when you get new missions, the game has a glitch effect over the entire screen. It happend two times to me, that game never exited that glitch state. First I thought, that was intended, but the game slowly got more and more unresponsive until it finally crashed back to the dashboard.
I stopped counting how often other characters just walked right through me during cutscenes. Which is nightmare inducing in first person!
The whole world feels kind of pointless. Yes, there are people around, but they don't do anything really. They just respond with weird oneliners, don't have any animations when talking. I constantly here people talking about things, but I don't see any people.
The AI is absolutely laughable. I would say, that on average in any combat encounter I had until now, at least 2 enemies just sat somewhere on couch, or chair, waiting for me to shoot them. Enemies that do move obviously can't climb stairs and go through doors. Some of them can see and shoot you through walls, but some glas windows make a bulletproof shield eventhough, you see a bullet hole in them.
Speaking of combat, many times I just enter combat mode and I have no idea why. I also get hacked with "overheat"all the time and I have no idea where that is coming from. I guess via cameras, because it stops when I shoot them. I'm not sure.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, this is one of the most confusing games I have ever played. There is little to no explanation of anything. And the stuff that is explained, is done so very poorly. For example the hacking mini game. It took me an embarrassing amount of time understand how that works. And I'm still not sure if I got it right now.
But I like the story so far, so that's a plus. But I fear, that the technical issues really prevent me from continuing my playthrough. The framerate, if you want to call it that, is giving me headaches, and it get's really annoying to have constant freezes, stutters and crashes. It's also no fun!
Just to make it complete, here is a list of all issues I encounterd so far:
- Duplicated models. One of them is animated the other just sits, there.
- Driving with a vehicle slows down the entire game to like 15 fps
- Heavily lit areas slow down to like 15fps or less
- Constant issues with streaming data for models, textures etc.
- Loading screens are sometimes just black with some smoke effects. (Seriously, the loading screens are messed up!)
- Sometimes guns are not loaded and I pew pew with my empty hands
- When looking into a mirror sometimes the character is just naked
- When looking into a mirror while wearing a hat, neither hair nor hat are loaded
- Floating objects all over the place
- Sometimes my vehicle just does not accelerate
- Sometimes I get out of vehicle when trying to accelerate
- Sometimes the enemy AI completely shuts of and just sits or stands somewhere
- People standing in tables, walls and other stuff
- Animation don't play and people just slide into position
- Dexter DeShawn slowly slid out of the car during a corner in the first encounter. Slid right back after the corner.
- Various crashes with no particular thing I did every time
- I get phone calls during conversations, which is "realistic" I guess
- Sometimes the game don't get out of glitch state after getting a new job -> which usually ends in a crash
- The navigation is hard to use, since it forces you to take your eyes of the road. Also the navigation map is so small, that you constantly overshoot corners, because I'm pretty much passed them when I see it on the nav screen.
- The UI is confusing as hell.
- The UI colors are very hard to read
- The UI size can't be increased, which makes it even harder to use.
- There is no "dismantle all junk" option
- I probably forgot a lot of things, it's just so much...