I'm watching the games being presented at E3 and they all suck. They are more of the same, clean map, childish, without any argument of quality or innovation. The only one that seems to be saved is Farcry 6, the rest is pure rubbish. But not even farcry 6 surpasses the artistic quality of Cyberpunk.
Agreed. The first day just felt pretty weak.
I've been playing Cyberpunk little more these past weeks and I recognize the fact how the open world wasn't super well established AS AN EXPERIENCE. You just got wayyyyyyy too many quests and it doesn't feel like all you're doing other than just maxing out level when going around the world.
I hope they can somehow improve the experience with hiring more staff members to work on the open world experience and making the world a little more personal than just randomly roaming around and not really knowing what you're doing.
I think Rockstar had perfected the story telling quite well since GTA 3 where you don't just get random gigs anymore like in GTA 2 with stuff like Rampage and other where you're just given some random stuff to do once. They have a long quest chains of each quest giver, always resulting in very satisfying last quests.
I don't think GTA necessarily did "open world" BETTER, but the way quests were handed to you felt more personal.
Cyberpunk definitely did
more on how the open world looks, with the street art especially, and how they put all these different gangs in crime scenes and how many cyberpsychos there are with different abilities and looks. It just maybe became a little too disorganized to experience and that's one of it's major flaws, and I never felt like this was articulated very well anywhere.
So if they show up some ways to rework the existing experience and how you gain quests and complete missions, adding some polish to police and AI, and expansion teaser, rework on how you can perceive the quests in map, filter out information better.... there's clearly a path to making the experience superb.
I think open world worked very well in Witcher where you were fighting different creatures and they all had their own interesting back story. But when you're only facing against people in buildings, it's going to eventually start feeling tiresome, no matter how much effort you put in building design and the characters and the loot.
They need to put more effort on giving gangs more identity, giving more reason to go after specific targets. Gang reputation is clearly one way they could definitely do it. Changing resistances, adding more unique enemies, voice narrating the shards, reworking the hacking minigame/UI to be less intrusive and more enjoyable experience (in my opinion it kinda fails as repetitive simple task) etc...
If you look at the other open world games which had No Man Sky type of content in early, and later got much better with upgrades, Cyberpunk could definitely get there with same level of passion. They just need to move from slow technical level improvements to actual content and reworking some ideas.
Multiplayer is definitely one way they can make the game interesting and it'll likely be a key factor on bringing interest back in large numbers.