I honestly don't understand why sitting down or eating at a booth defines how good a game is. An rpg does not require sitting mechanics to be good. That will never enter my list of must haves for a good rpg. For 50 years in rpg gaming, no game systems touted their sitting mechanics.
would it be cool if some of those features existed? sure, does it mean the game is not good if it doesn't? for me and many others, not really. When a game can't do everything the mind can come up with, thats when you use your imagination. No game is currently going to recreate life totally.
Also, the game is not on rails. except main story, which is not the majority of the content. You don't need to loot anything, or shoot anything outside main story.
But honestly I think you could say that about almost all features, the game doesn't require you to be able to use different weapons, just a single gun is fine. Why bother with letting you get different cars, just make it like a single "batmobile", gigs not really needed, romantic options is not required either, as you have the main quest so just follow that.
But when we talk RPG, people expect that you can change weapons and armors, that the world at least to some degree tries to immerse the player into it. Look at how many lore items are in the game, TV shows talking about what is going on, why is that needed?
To me, sure you could cut all the way into the bone in a RPG game, and remove all things that is not immediately important for the main story, but overall it ruins the experience.
Take Fallout 4, when they decided that it was a good idea to cut the dialog system to an almost bare minimum, removing most of the options for interacting, asking questions and get clarifications from NPCs, because they worked on the assumption that players wouldn't care to read these things anyway. That alone decreased the RPG quality of the game a whole lot, compared to former Fallout games.
CDPR did kind of the same in CP, and even worse in some degree, simply by using different colors for you responses, because yellow mean push the story forward and blue means get information. So you basically only have 2 options in CP, where most yellow options lead to the same thing anyway. The mere fact that the player is made aware which options push forward dialog, is ruining a lot of the RPG elements in my opinion, because you as player might not especially choose to say stuff based on what you feel you should, but rather because you ought to say blue before yellow, as you might miss out on things otherwise.
RPG games I would assume is one of the most difficult types of games to do well, but cutting down features as the solution, is not something that benefits them in my opinion.
I think a lot of it also comes down to how they structure their games, because we know that you as player can buy food from certain NPCs, so that functionality is already in the game. So couldn't that feature or AI simply have been copied or applied to all food vendors? We know that you can sit on certain chairs, yet most of them you can't, why isn't such feature simply copied to all chairs, when added to the game world with a standard animation of V sitting down. It might not be used a whole lot, but since the feature is already implemented and they still have to add all the chairs to the world, it shouldn't be that huge a problem.
The biggest issue, is that the food/drink system is not very well implemented in the game, to the point where it is useless. If they however had made sure that it was and eating and drinking for instance lasted a lot longer, so you only had to eat and drink a few time a day, but the benefits were much greater and had a much higher cost than it has now, it could be a useful feature in my opinion. Like certain food increasing "Amount of street cred earn" others "Chance to critical strike" and so forth, but you could only have one of these buffs at the time. But the various systems in the game doesn't really play well together, like food being made obsolete simply from being able to spam healing items.
, assh*le Dutch is still breathing, Mary says bye and put a few flowers on my grave. Wonderful.