My first impressions are: I feel ashamed I bought a PS4 copie for a relative.
6 hours in:
tl;dr: Sadly, the game really excels at nothing.
- The city is great but what's done with the open world is superficial (once you put some chaos into it, the open world stops being believable), the writing is good but I can't say I'm impressed so far. On a personal matter, I'm not really found of the setting and what they did with it.
- First-person was a very, very good choice. The cinematography is great if not excellent on most of the dialogs/scene. Unfortunately, the fact that you see everything through V's eyes underlines every visual issues in the game and disrupts the immersion abruptly. And I really hope the next-gen patch on console provide a FOV slider.
- Most gameplay aspects of the game are mediocre. Driving, melee, gunfight, hacking, stealth: nothing so far is impressive nor indicative of an upcoming depth. I really hope it's getting better with time, because the issue was there with TW3 already.
- I've yet to understand why I should craft something.
- The IA is laughable.
- The UI is terrible. Menuing is a chore. The world map in particular is a disaster. On top of that, you need the minimap. You can't do anything without it. For a game with such visuals sometimes, that's a big flaw. You can be creative instead of using a minimap. Ghost of Tsushima did something excellent.
- A lot of visual bugs everywhere, often breaking immersion. Got a visual bug on my first (!) action on the Nomad path, it was not a pleasing start at all, considering I've already seen the scene flawlessly delivered multiple times in gameplay trailers before.
- Dildos, sex ads, the penis options in the character creation: I might be too old to play video games, but that's not funny. Showing titties everywhere is what you call "mature" when you're in your 10s or 20s. Past that it's childish.
- Sometimes this game feels as hysterical as a Netflix show. You know, they keep on dramatizing, overreacting and emphasizing everything to keep you artificially hooked. CP77 writing and world building often has poor effects like that, this is very Rockstar-like, unfortunately.
A disappointment. I spent the year playing almost bugfree
elegant games with excellent visuals and art direction (Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us 2, Demon's Souls, P5R, Disco Elysium...).
CP77 feels bloated, full of things that don't connect very well causing the game to lack focus and depth. Many times I thought "quantity over quality". In fact, that's an unfortunate and tasteless rollercoaster between the two. This game would have survived being more focused on some core refined aspects, limiting Night City to a district wouldn't have hurt either. An abundance of patches won't make a masterpiece out of a game bloated with barely functional, uninteresting, mundane and sometimes meaningless features. That's depressing. The (sometimes very) good doesn't outweight the (sometimes very) bad.
The fact that they hide console footage on purpose for so long, that they provided only PC keys to journos using (of course...) the latest NVIDIA cards is direspectful. Because the "metacritic" score on consoles would tank the sales. That's a disappointment that goes beyond what CP77 finally is. I'm saying it again: in a year when there is confusion between console generations, not being cristal clear about what the player is getting by buying a PS4 or XBOX copy is dishonest and shady. I didn't expect that from CDPR. This is worst than the worst moves from Ubisoft. Sadly, it will be remembered.
I'm putting the game on hold until the next-gen patch on consoles. I surely don't recommend it in its current state, especially on PS4/PS5.
edit: kudos to the devs who had to suffer endless crunch time under such poor direction and management. You did your best, they did not.
CDPR CEO: "CP77 will run surprisingly well on PS4 and XBOX One consoles." 11/27/2020
