Edit: Small updates(blue text) after patch 1.05 and another 30 hours of gameplay (finished my first playthrough and started another one).
Edit no.2: Another small update. Patch 1.31.
After 94 hours on my first playthrough (mainly because I refuse to fast travel), I can say I was lucky and got a mostly trouble free experience. But I hope this game gets a lot more work put into it to fix, replace, add or expand multiple gameplay systems that are nowhere near what/where they should be. I was just a few hours in and I already thought that this game needs the No Man's Sky treatment.
It feels like like most of the budget and time spent developing this game were spent on graphical and audio presentation, witch are great. The main story is great, the writing for it is good. Some of the sidequests are great SF stories. The Peralez, god damn, this needs a continuation. And don't get me started on Lizzy Wizzy. She scared me more than Smasher. Everything else... mediocre at best, unacceptable at worst (the wanted system, the magic squad of the NCPD that comes after you...) or there needed to be more of it in the game (better naming convention for weapons and addons, just look at how IRL weapons manufacturers name their products and variants of them; what happened to that mayor we saved for the nomad fixer?!).
Also, if you will put [relatively] important story info in text logs scattered around the world, I will collect it but WILL NOT read it. Make it an audio log that I can listen to while doing something else. Look into what Ubisoft has done in WD Legion, if you don't have the money to get someone to read them all.
I will now list a few bugs I encountered or things that I consider bugs or missing.
1. No key bind for weapon holstering. This needs to exist. The weapon wheel also needs to be reworked. I only used it to holster my weapon and, rarely, to select a grenade type. And every time I lost around 5 seconds fiddling with my mouse to find the pixels that marked the holster weapon area. Just annoying.
Edit: Found out how to holster weapon without using the weapon wheel. You need to double tap the cycle weapon key (Alt, be default). The only place I found this information, in game, was a tutorial text when you are attacked while Jackey gives you a ride home...
2. If I press one button once to see the map. I should press one button once to get back to the game. Not one 2 times. Also, the same keybind for crouch toggle and skip dialogue?! Really?
3. A lot of broken animations. A few in free roam, when NPCs interact with something. But mostly in cutscenes. Most obvious for me was the driving animation for Claire, when driving me back to the garage. The wheel spins when taking a turn, but her hands don't move and are not aligned properly on the wheel. Also, when she drops me off in front of the garage, why does she drive away instead of, you know, parking the car in the garage?
4. Unimportant, but... the mirror animations don't play. Also, hair and helmet are not rendered in the mirror.
Edit: On my second playthrough, the hair rendered but none of my clothes did. But, after patch 1.05, everything is rendered properly. I can't say if the animations are ok. Due to my screen resolution and level of detail, it's kind of difficult to see the facial animations in the reflection.
Edit no.2: Now that I play at 1080p, the mirror animations are clearly visible. Creepy, but visible...
5. My shadow doesn't have a head, at least in the few locations I noticed it (indoors and out).
Edit: After patch 1.05, the shadow has a head but no hair or helmet.
6. I only got one bugged gig, south part of Kabuki, east of Afterlife. I never got the call to start the gig, but I got inside where I found a corpo army vet and recovered some medicine...
Edit: After patch 1.05 this gig started properly on my second playthrough, but it's still bugged on the first one.
7. Sometimes, item info cards get stuck on screen after I exit the inventory. And, once, they stopped showing up. I need to restart the game to fix this.
8. If I interact with with one of the endless number of text logs scattered everywhere and press C to close the window too quickly, the camera gets stuck in place. To get it unstuck I need to press Esc and then get back to the game.
Edit no.2: Still happening.
9. Driving from inside the cars is almost impossible. I can't see the front of the car, so I can't see the road in front of me thus I can't see when to turn or incoming traffic. And that's a shame, because the interiors of most of the cars are great.
Edit: This is true for many cars but not all. The Porche, for example, is ok to drive from inside the car.
Edit no.2: With better and more consistent FPS comes better control for vehicules.
10. It would be better if the path shown on the minimap, when I select a destination, was rendered on the road in front of my eyes. That way I pay attention to the road and traffic, instead of constantly glancing to the top right at the minimap.
11. Someone forgot to apply post-processing on two or three audio lines. Two of them were for Judy.
Edit: The last line Dennis says at the end of Big in Japan is from a different voice actor. Nancy has on wrong voice line when getting out of that maelstrom club.
12. I would be good for the games pacing if side missions would be spread out more as the main story goes on. I'm at the Nocturne Op55n1 mission and I already did all gigs, NCPD alerts, assaults, etc. All I have left are those shoot outs that you see only on the minimap. At least find a way to generate more blue icon events. And make gigs available as I progress through the main story, not all at once. More chained missions would be nice.
13. I can't take a nap at Judy's, River's or Panam's place. Stash access is also weird. At Panam's and River's I can't access it at all, and at Judy's I have to be directly in front or to the left of that box to get the interaction prompt.
14. At 1280x720 resolution, if I have a weapon with 6 slots, I can't use the last one down. It is fully visible but I'm not able to click on it to select it. At 1080, I can.
15. There's a problem with the flying cars. You either see them or you hear them. Never at the same time.
16. V's avatar in the inventory screen seems blurred or out of focus?! At least very low quality compared to everything else on the screen.
17. I hope, in time, the small encounters on the map (assault in progress, reported crime, suspected organized crime activity) will became random encounters that will spawn on the map as we play. Not just somewhere in our vicinity, but depending on the event type. A bounty should be anywhere, assault in progress maybe somewhere in the same region. And the enemies could be randomized depending on what gangs are active in that region. This change would make the game a lot more replayable. I think there's already a somewhat random event, marked with a star, that are shoot-outs between gangs. Expand on that.
I play on AMD Ryzen 7 1700x, on a Asus Crosshair VI Hero, with 16 GB RAM and a Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti (yeah, I know), from a HyperX SSD. With textures at max, most everything else on medium, at 1260x720 I get about around 35 FPS, with occasional drops below 30. Initially I activated film grain and chromatic aberrations, thinking they will hide the upscaling on my 1080p monitor. But nope, it just made everything look blurry. After I deactivated them. it looked a lot better and crispier than I hoped.
Edit: After patch 1.05, I noticed an 10-15 FPS increase, depending on the area. I still get drops below 30, from time to time, but the average is around 40 now.
Edit no.2: I changed my GPU. Upgraded to a RTX 3060 Ti. I'm now playing at 1080p with almost everything maxed out, raytracing lighting on medium and DLSS on Performance. My FPS is now arround 50 - 70, depending on location and other factors. I need to play with the settings a bit to get a constant 60+ FPS.
And, now that I finished the game once, I have to say. My depression thanks you, writers that came up with the endings. It really needed some help to bring me back down, because lately I finally started to feel a bit better about myself and my lot in life.
