Cyberpunk 2077 User Reviews & Impressions

[Lil_Glow]

Yes, the game has issues. Undoubtedly those issues are made much worse on last gen consoles. However, my own experience has been quite good on PC. I'm on a 6 year old graphics card and can play fine with most settings at ultra and few either on high or medium, though granted at the time it was a beast of a card so not like it's a mid-tier 6 year old card. Obviously not an RTX card so can't speak to how that works. Biggest gripe I have is the nonsensical use of hardcoded keybinds that really don't make a lot of sense to me at all, but here's hoping that will be addressed by the devs in an early patch.

Like everyone I've seen plenty of items on the ground in weird places that make them unlootable, and while that is annoying, it's never been an important item. Seen crowd NPCs walk into the ground once, found it humorous. Little quirks here and there that I trust will be fixed. On the whole, seen less weird stuff happening around Night City than I have in any Bethesda title, and I've put over 3k hours into FO4 alone so clearly weird things happening doesn't stop me from enjoying a game.

Going back to the first gameplay demo footage I can say that yes, there are somethings I really wish were in the release game. The character model for V used in that demo did look better, and frankly the lighting in the character creation section looked better (why is there a greenish tint in the released game), and admittedly taking out that first scav by sticking him in the freezer and shooting him under the water to keep it quiet looked a lot cooler than what we ended up with.

During character creation up at the top it says that looks are everything in Night City, yet the lack of item previews in shops or the ability to give an item the appearance of another item really does put a hamper on the idea that looks are indeed everything. And on the topic of character creation, why are we not able to change V's physique even a little bit? I get playing an obese character wouldn't really make sense in V's line of work (even if it would be hilarious), but being unable to change muscle thickness or hip width does hamper replayability a bit. Even though its an FPS game, I certainly enjoy going into photo mode and snapping cinematic shots of myself and some variety in shape would be nice. Last thing I want to comment on about character customization is how disappointed I am with the choices for piercings. Why can't I have some simple small hoop earrings on both ears. Why are there like no symmetrical options? You can customize pube hair but can't even get some basic jewelry looks going.

Moving on I want to just say that I really do enjoy the game. I'm not a fan of the sex ads everywhere but I know it's part of the cyberpunk genre and the devs have truly done a wonderful job of creating a dystopian future setting and bringing it to life. The scale of the world is well done I think and the ability to customize your origin is a touch I always appreciate in games. I've enjoyed the gameplay a lot and playing on Very Hard I'm having a blast trying to be stealthy and using hacking to my advantage. The weapons and clothes have a nice variety of looks, though I do wish we could customize paint jobs and fabric prints ourselves. The various cars and bikes you can buy are great looking and I love the variety, and while driving can be a bit touchy I'm getting the hang of it the more I play. I'm avoiding fast travel and making a point to drive around the city, only ran over a few people so far.

I've made it to Act 3 so far but have no finished the main story. From what I've done I'm enjoying the narrative a lot and have found it to be rather interesting and engaging. Combining it with the gameplay aspects I mentioned above I'd say the overall package of the game is rather solid and I've already sunk about 60 hours into the game, so I'd say the game has been a success for me.

It's easy for me to pin point areas of the game I'd like to see improved because overall they are a lot fewer in number and really don't subtract from my overall enjoyment of the game. Seeing them improved would ensure this game be one of my long term games for the next decade, as they would enhance my replay enjoyment a good deal, but for my first time through the game they aren't taking the fun out of the game for me.

On steam I gave the game a rating 9.5/10. I've put about 30 more hours into the game since that review and at this point I stand by my rating. The game is a lot of fun and it's clear to me that when you've been working on a title for a long time you're bound to disappoint people who have built up their own image of what the game will be like. I think to some extent people were just too hyped up for this game and it was never going tick all the boxes for everyone.

I will end by saying thank you to the development team for your hardwork and I know you've got a lot more you'll be doing for the game in the coming months.

p.s. The marketing team responsible for misleading fans on the quality of the game on last gen consoles, as well as placing the limits on what reviewers could share, should be fired. Not just because of how they've made customers feel but because of the financial hit they've cost their company. Hopefully they'll know better for the next company.

 

[Murderlin7]

loving it so far. not nearly as buggy as before

 

[ionlysmokethegoods]

Still love it bugs and all

Post automatically merged: Dec 19, 2020

It may have its problems but i trust they will be fixed this is CD PROJEKT RED after all not Bethesda lol (I'm still recuperating from that turd of a game). At least there a fully fleshed out game. Thanks CD PROJEKT RED I still love you guys ;^)

 

[Bubba-Fatt]

Hello from Australia.

Obviously CDPR is taking a lot of heat lately. But it's not all bad news. I'd like to thank the devs, artists, and everyone else involved. I am really enjoying what you're made. Your work is appreciated, and I'm glad I spent the money on it. Don't let the negativity on social media get you down. A lot of people are enjoying the game.

 

[NorseGraphics]

I'm happy with the game. And so is Judy.

 

[Mateusz_Es]

Few glitches that's true, but overall experience - awesome. Best game of the year for sure. Story, gameplay and music.. climat! 12/10.

 

[Void Eclipse]

I have pretty powerful PC and game runs just fine for me, I encountered very few bugs in 70 hours. The only thing I really don't like is a "fake content" which is weapons system - the same dozen of weapons with randomized stats. Managing them is damn waste of time and not fun at all. The best and iconic first person shooters have just dozen of unique weapons without upgrading, crafting and leveling, and they feel absolutely fine. Also, look at new vegas - you get a set of static weapons and you are completely happy with them. It does not feel less rpg-ish without diablo/borderlands randomized loot.

 

[vixvixvixvix]

I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a 3 years old PC. One word: MASTERPIECE!

 

[General_Sharkseant]

Well i am quite happy with Cyberpunk 2077,


ATTENTION I WILL TELLMANY SPOILERS

I play it on PC so and the Performance is quite good i had some crashes mostly when i made too much stuff blow up kat the same time (mostly with my rocket launcher)

I love the Story. and the Gameplay is quite good. so the most stuff is good and the bugs i expirenced werent gamebreaking now to the bad stuff:

the main problems are actuall things that could be fixed afterwards except one: that the gangs do not realy handle like factions. it isnt like i could decide to rather help one gang or another it is more like these are place holders you can interact with i will try in my next run other approaches at certain points but i dont think it will change much. there is literally only one point i found where you can chose and that was the netwatch thing already told in the trailer and even that is shit as anyways both sides will backstap you. In small missions it will have an Impact but the big stuff so: is militek a friend or a foew etc. doesnt matter the problem is here the interference with the contracts you cant realy chose sides if you want to play every side mission as you normaly steal something of the local gang. this issue is my biggest one. because it realy is contrary to my expectations.

what me botherd me with the story was that the counter for how fast i will fie went up this thing is absolutely useless as i can spend as much time as i want in the side missions and it doesnt goes up waht it also shouldnt because the only way to safe V would be to play the end, my suggestion: just edit the story arks in such a way that V is alive and is still in night city (this would also allow more story DLCsb after the healing) i literally rushed through thze story because i though my char will die at some point if i dont do a certain mission bevorehand which will at least allow me to survive for a bigger time span lets say a 5 years so your story will indeed end if you dont do that but now you have a bit more time in which it makes actual sense for V to try not to die waht makes it worse is that literally everyone in the main story tells me that i will die very very soon. this could also be fixe dby saying at the start that it will take some years befor i die as V.

other things:

to change some appearences and cosmetics most importantly cosmetics after you created yo char. it is the year 2077 people change up their bodys as they like let us players also do that give us more freedoms and possibilitys.

let me fucking sit and eat food etc. like in the mission, dont make it neccessary to consume these that way but make it possible to sit on a bar etc. make our characters live in night city

no dual wielding eventthough other characters can do it. i would have noe problem not having the ability to dual wield but due to other characters pbeing able to do this i realy also want to do it.

make fixers more personal, except to just let them call you and say hey i am alive now kill shit for me let there be a little questline to prove them your value (maybe except your street cred is high enough)

make it possible to either break through a door per force or to use your technical skill as far as i know there is always either one of the two checks so either technical level or strenght not both but this disallows different approaches to some situations so i think both should be possible in certain cases.

a daily live circle of NPC is very hard to do for so many NPC but something like a random activity circle makes more sense, like the NPC just walks down the paveway but there is a certain chance he will then walk to the nearest diner and order something if he is long enough near the character to actually do so.

more cars and people i mena this is a megapolis there should be hundrets of cars or atleast a train siystem with many many people awand highways up and down also there are way to few people walking around in the city etc. this mege city as a quieter traffic then my hometown with 40.000 citiciens of course this will demand more powerfull computers but there already is a slider for that just make it longer.

eventhough the lore of the tabletop tells a different story there dont seem to be many nudists or heavily with exotics augmented people i mean for sure the exotic people should only be in the city centre as theyneed to bequite rich but thaat is no excuse for nearly none.

My Ideas for upcoming DLC:

- BIological Implants similar to the cyberware this exists according to the law and we should get it.
- full Borg conversion
- individualisation of cars and guns and self designed guns so like Jonny has his personalised gun why not let V have one.
-

what i personally do not need:
- multiplayer
- an Anime

the end result:

you should have postponed the game and made it more like it seemed in the trailers to some extend and atleast now make it into the experience you showed in th trailers i think it is a good game esspecially in the side mission but it needs quite much.

Post automatically merged: Dec 19, 2020

I would also like a white skin type. The first is sort of Jaundice/Liver failure.

yeah me to the normal white skin type is to normal for me i prefer to make my charachters either liek my skin tone, carefully formed due to a long time of evading sunlight in my dark room playing games or stright up albinos.

 

[JackHallow]

I love this game, I think it is sad that everyone is following the trend and doing the herd animal mentality and hating the game cause it is a trend right now. Yes, they failed big time with last-gen consoles, but they are trying to repair that mistake with refunds and patching the game as fast as they can.
I have been playing for almost 50 hours and haven’t finished the main story yet. I really, really love this game, by far my favourite game in recent years. Last time I was this immersed in a game was with Witcher 3. I felt really sorry for CDPR that have worked this hard and all the gamers that will miss this masterpiece because of all the hate. Yes, it is a bit buggy (but not that much I am playing on PC), nothing game breaking at all mostly small bugs that will be fixed with the patches to come. For me the only downside is the NPC and police AI, that can be immersive breaking sometimes, but other than that it is awesome. Not played on last-gen console, but the state, there seems not to be OK, they should just delay the release on PS4 and Xbox and told us the truth. I think that it would have been much less hate then. Well, well it’s done. Hopefully they will patch the bugs and AI soon and keep adding free and paid DLCs that will do this game justice.
I really hope I can enjoy Cyberpunk and night city for a long time ahead. The characters, the world, the city, the story, the music, the combat, variety of quests. Never thought I would feel for a game as I did with Witcher but I was wrong. Masterpiece.

For me there are so many small things that makes to world so much alive, the easter eggs, random events and things like this video:

It is the small things that makes the difference.

I think Shroud is right:

Cheers and I hope you all will enjoy Night City and Cyberpunk!

 

[groovyboy2]

So... finally, here it is! What do you think about Cyberpunk?

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Quote of the day:
In a world where you can be anyone and meet many, many other characters why would you only be able to pick between TWO romance options for either gender ( one heterosexual and one homosexual) You could literally have a romantic relationship with aliens and cat people (Mass Effect and Skyrim again) but I can only choose between two people in a futuristic, sifi RPG were you can literally make a transgender character! How? Why?

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As for myself, I have decided to let this game age in the cellar for 1-2 years to become a true masterpiece. If you played The Witcher Wild Hunt long enough, you know the difference between version 1.01 and 1.32. If you didn't, trust me - it was very noticeable. I enjoyed the game so much more when the bugs and rough edges were refined, so I am going to do this with Cyberpunk.

Post automatically merged: Dec 19, 2020

i cant sent you a mail,,i tried but its everything about how to report a bug o glitches....welll,,i reporting that i am very pleased with the game on my pc,,,with my rig,,,i cant use it on 4k,,,but a full hd works pefectly
greetings from Croatia

Post automatically merged: Dec 19, 2020

you merit every dollar,with a tottal respect,,because i was a real witcher fan,,,but it was cracked,,,sorry,,,but now,,even there is a cyberpunk free,,i bought it,,,because it goes to cd red and all the crew

 

[Natashaluv94]

Okay, I mostly agree with your post but no one can say with a straight face that No Man's Sky became "a game better than what they promised". It became much much better but it will never be what they promised. I'm sure CP2077 will though.

Mention one thing they haven't implemented now that was in the E3 trailer ?

- More varied biomes and grass
- Larger dinos and more varied species on each planet.
- Beaches, under water biomes.
- More ship types and more varied exteriors on them.
- Combat in space near freighters.
- Real Multiplayer.

I could go on of what they have added, not one thing in the trailer that you can't find in game now.

I don't want this to turn this discussion into NMS, but in my mind they have delivered what they promised and much more, if a small group of people can work this hard and constantly dish out content, then big studios like CDPR, Ubisoft and Rockstar has no excuses at all.

 

[groovyboy2]

well dont turn this in discussion into Nms,,,,because its about cyberpunk 2077

 

[Murzinio]

To start with a short summary of what the game is: fantastic parts that no other game can match in cyberpunk genre, but at the same time it feels like an early access game being sold for 60$ as a finished product. The game nails parts that Witcher 3 did for the most part but there's no evolution and even regress in some parts.
I know CDPR will fix a lot but I don't know how much exactly. The game should have never came out in this state anyway. I have a feeling it should be released in 2021 and old consoles scrapped completely, I know now barely anyone has PS5 but a year from now it would be a more reasonable idea.
CDPR did it with W3 already which skipped ps3/x360 and should have done the same here. In 2020 it wasn't feasible, so yet another reason to delay the game.

Some great things the game delivers:
Visuals - Night City looks amazing if you have the hardware for it. Nothing else comes close. Sometimes I would just drive around and admire the views, taking screenshots with the photo mode (nice addition too)

Main story - The beginning feels rushed, but by the end of act 1 I was hooked 100% and played until 7am. This happened again in act 2. Whole time I wanted to know what happens next and I was really invested.

Side quests - Some side quests are so good they feel like they should be part of the main story. Johnny, Judy, Peralez, River quests were great to just name a few. I randomly found some good side quests by exploring the map too, a few hilarious ones too.

Characters - Again here the game excels like Witcher 3. I will remember Johnny Silverhand, Jackie, Judy, Panam, Viktor, Misty, Takemura, Evelyn and plenty of others. Really well done, complex characters with good stories to tell and motivations.

World and lore: The world of cyberpunk is fascinating, and there's tons of lore for anyone willing to explore. We only have night city and depth in terms of lore is amazing. We got so many unique factions with different motivations. I felt wanting to learn more all the time, what happened in the years past, what is going on in other places in the world, lots of potential for sequels or prequels.

Soundtrack - feels on point very often, nails the cyberpunk feel especially in some main quest segments.

But...
Visuals are not perfect - details pop in all the time when driving, LOD is even worse than Witcher 3 in some places and that was a major complaint. You can see 2d cars in the distance that look comical. Even worse in badlands, I can see details spawning 20m in front of me. But also noticeable in city when driving fast.

I'm playing on a fast SSD, 3900X, and 16GB RAM, the game barely uses 3-5GB of my RAM. My GPU has 11GB VRAM, game doesn't use that. I get console limitations but is it really so hard to make it more scalable or just exposed in configs for enthusiasts with strong PCs? Ok, I know it's hard. But it's doable and something you should do as a major studio. You're no longer a 100 dev team with one small studio in Warsaw.
As a programmer I know for a fact you can query available RAM at any time through windows API so no excuses there please.

Story is great, but there's just not much of it - we get 3 acts in theory, in practice it feels like prologue, act 2, epilogue. I know the official explanation but I think CDPR got it completely wrong. W3 main story wasn't too long, it was just that side quests were more interesting past some points. W3 felt rushed after finding Ciri and lacking in that part, that was a common complaint. Only HoS later and BaW fixed that issue to some extent by giving more story content. I think CDPR got completely the wrong idea about why players were not finishing the main quest and rather than learning from mistakes from W3 went the opposite direction and cut it even further. It feels like a step back rather than improvement over W3. (where main quest wasn't the best part by no means) I thought I'm in 1/3rd of the story and the game ended 3h later. Another thing is, most endings come down to picking up some options in the last quest, except some that require you to finish some side quests in a correct way. But these are the side quests that I felt should be main story. There is also this dissonance between main story and the game. After act 1 we're being rushed to complete the main quests as soon as we can while we do 30 side quests and 1000 gigs. It just doesn't work. CDPR got away with it in Witcher 3 where it was similar, but here it just doesn't work.

The world is superficial, it looks beautiful but once you take a closer look you realize there's nothing to do in it outside of quests. We have gyms, food vendors, tons of NPCs etc. All are just decorations, no way to interact with anything.

Sound - while "main soundtrack" is very good, radio stations feel extremely limited, should have more stations and variety, more sounds. Many songs feel like 2020 and not 2077. In general radio doesn't even come close to GTA and lets not pretend this game is unrelated to GTA.

Interesting but half done ideas
Rogue AIs, blackwall - great ideas, we barely get a glimpse of a fascinating part of the world that I wanted to see more of.
Badlands - almost nothing to do there, few quests and that's it.
We have all these interesting gangs and factions in Night City and do nothing with them, they come down to being enemies to shoot in scripted encounters or for bounties. With some exceptions, but in general this is a disappointment.

Something on gameplay... Keep in mind I played focused on hacking, though also invested perks in crafting, reflexes, cool.
Good parts:
Lots of fun with hacking, every mission has tons of objects to interact with.
Several ways to approach each mission, you can be a netrunner just hacking 100% of the time, you can be hulk or samurai running with a katana or mantis blades, you can focus on on powerful handguns like johny, or a mix of everything.
Some cool ideas for weapons.
Skill trees are a huge improvement over w3 and there's a lot of fun to be had with different builds.
Some cool implant ideas. Mantis blades, kerezhnikov etz.

Issues with what is there:
Hacking
Should be more fleshed out, the minigame we have is cool but gets tiring halfway through the game, if we're going with minigames ME2 at least had a few different ones, should be more variety.
Not enough quickhacks, I ended up using 2-3 most of the time and I focused on a netrunner build with INT and perks into it.
Weapons
There's plenty of weapons in the game but many feel the same and that's a problem when you focus on one skill tree. Personally I focused gun skills on rifles, we have like 3 assault rifle types, each model falls into one of these types and there's no real difference between them that you can feel. I thought we will get more as the game progresses but no, that's all there is. No different modes for guns either that would add variety. Some even look almost the same if not completely the same. Add-ons system (scopes, muzzles etc.) are cool but why can't we change them quickly from the weapons menu? Mods I understand, but that should be doable with add-ons. Other games did it way before. And why can't we even get a flashlight or some grips etc? Not to mention grenade launchers etc. Stalker had that over 10 years ago.
Implants
After we get the eye implant, every other one feels like buying a new gun at the store. There should be some sort of animation and more effect in appearance to really get the feeling we're becoming cyborgs pretty much. We do that with new weapons, why not implants? This is a major theme in the genre. Missed opportunity to explore cyberpsychosis by player as well. Then there's the fact implants are limited as well. Should be more variety, I left some slots unused because it didn't really matter for me to get some implants. And we can't even get anything like night vision or maybe thermal vision which is silly.

Missing and broken parts
Crafting doesn't feel finished. We barely get any schematics. Upgrading isn't good enough, at first I thought I can use it to keep my good looking armor but it only gets you so far. It doesn't change the value of the gun either, feels there's tons of issues with economics.
No customization for crafted items, random stats? Another half done feature.
Driving is horrible. There are some exceptions like caliburn or jackie's bike but overall it's just not good. Feels more like riding a horse than a car, or driving on ice. Not even sure how to describe it. Devs got feedback from it on the first trailers, I even remember talking about it on my interview with them in late 2018. Nothing was changed it seems. Every ride needs tons of space to turn at higher speed and it just doesn't feel right when driving around. I noticed I got used to it at first few hours and it didn't bother me so much after that, but I think that may be the reason why it is like that. Devs got used to it and couldn't see the problem anymore. Just a wild guess. I didn't expect a race sim game of course, but every GTA game I can remember had better driving that is not even close to cyberpunk.

Loot system
When I can get rare weapons worse than common ones, something just feels off. There's no point in buying guns or armor, you quickly find something better by looting. Another example of broken economics.

Tutorials
Game fails to explain it's features, I often had to look up how to do something on google, or to understand how some mechanic works. Took me a while to get hacking even. And that was my focus from start, hell I'm even a programmer with some reverse engineering knowledge irl lol. Games like shadow of war handled it way better.

UI:
Game just doesn't show me information I need very often. How many rounds in a magazine does each weapon have? What kind of fire mode does it have? What is the range? Which mods go where? Who knows...

Broken or missing stuff in general
Bugs and crashes
No game should be released in this state. This is sadly now a standard in AAA games but even here Cyberpunk stands out, that's how bad it is. It's one of the worst releases in that regard I can remember. Witcher 3 had problems at launch but it was nowhere this close.
At first I didn't get many and the ones I got were funny glitches at best. As I continued to play the game I started to get way more and more immersion braking or a few progression breaking ones.
99% of the time save and reload fixed it but it just takes you out of the game. I stopped counting how many crashes I got after the first act. Game is just unstable.

Lifepaths are a joke
The way they were portrayed in promo material everyone expected MUCH more than what we got. Fans spent tons of time discussing them and planning their playthrough around them. In the game they feel like an afterthought shoved in close before release. For a brief moment I got my hopes restored when I received a side quest related to them. Only to be disappointed after 2 dialogues and 1 fight. Whole thing took 5 minutes including driving to the target. Besides that all we get is 20 minutes of cutscenes at the start and some dialogue options later that most of the time don't even make a difference giving just a false illusion of choice. We were told they will increase replayability. They don't. They don't matter at all. We have one character who is a street kid no matter what we do. Dragon Age did it better - in 2009 on a way smaller budget and more origin stories. Sure, you ended up in grey wardens no matter what but initial story was longer, had more impact on later game, even the endings.

All that focus on clothes and style in marketing has nothing to do with the game
Npcs have distinct styles, the player often ends up grabbing random equipment with better stats - sometimes I had a really cool armor but found something 3x better in stats and it was difficult not to switch. Or if I didn't the game got way harder, even with the armor implants. Nice looking armor is just hard to find. This should be solved by more armor implants to choose from.

Ai for crowds and police
Crowds are decorations, they were more interactive in GTA San Andreas released on PS2. Not much to say there.
Cars move on rails, AI is non-existent. They won't move through obstacles, just stay there. Even if I park on the sidewalk with 10cm of my car standing out I will cause a traffic jam because the AI can't drive around that.
Police is broken, no other way to describe it. Spawning 2m from the player and not chasing him. After you run for 50m you're covered, police has no problems with you. Bounty system should work both ways, NCPD is corrupt so let us buy out ourselves if we fuck up something. Until we do send some bounty hunters after us if we managed to escape the police.

Character creator
Extremely limited and you can see why - there's no point in it, we don't see V almost at all. If we did, we don't even have a way to customize our looks. Whole thing looks like a marketing ploy to get headlines about genitals customization. It's hard to even get anyone decent looking. I would rather play with cool looking V from the trailers. Why not just have them as defaults like Mass Effect? Default Shepard looked great both male and female, and if you wanted a custom one you could get one. Default V looks cool both male and female too. You already had the assets, why drop them? Implants don't change appearance except for mantis blades and hand ones. No way to even get a haircut later. It's 2077, we should be able to do ridiculous things for customization and what we have is more limited than Witcher 3. That's another missed theme of the genre too I feel. We get that explored through NPCs but not the player...

False advertising
What we saw in the trailers and materials was cherry picked, these parts are great but rest of the game is not like it. Game was hyped up by developers as a revolutionary thing. It's nowhere close to that except maybe the huge city and visuals. I've seen some senior devs on twitter blaming it on unrealistic expectations but that just isn't fair. All my pre-release exposure to the game was official promo materials, and I got the same impressions as what to expect as many others did. Marketing created the unrealistic expectations, no one else.

To wrap it up:
Playing the game I feel like it was terribly mismanaged. Some parts are greatly detailed, some are barely there just to have something. I don't know how development looked like but clearly something went terribly wrong. This is a good game at the end of the day, but not the innovation everyone was expecting, CDPR really tries hard to maintain this image of the good guy among dev studios but they're just the same as everyone else, only difference being good PR. Until this release at least. What we got was an unfinished product, and even if we ignore bugs it's simply not what the marketing showed us.
Last time I was disappointed with a game like that was with ME Andromeda. And CP77 is definitely better, but also we were told to expect much more than with Andromeda.
I was cautiously optimistic all the time before release and I knew people were overhyping the game too much. I kept saying that as long as it's as good as Witcher 3 I will be happy. But it isn't. Copying the same stuff from a game released five years before doesn't make the new one as good, you need to evolve. CDPR did evolve between W1-W2-W3 and every game was different. Here I don't get that feeling.
I think a fair score for the game at this point is 7/10. Good game, definitely above average (I'm not using the IGN's 6-10 scale here, proper 1-10 scale) But to say it again: this feels like an early access game with all of the implications like bugs and features still being developed (hopefully), not a finished product. With a ton of patches and some DLCs it's definitely a potential for 8. I'm not sure about 9 (that would be my score for Witcher 3 GOTY), it would need some rework of the lifepaths and more content in the main story for that.
Major disappointment and a fitting end to 2020.

PS of my personal experience related to the game:
Handling of preorders on gog was terrible. I wanted 100% of my money to go to CDPR. You get a time limited discount for the merch that was out of stock and there was no way to preorder anything. You get nothing from preordering the game, you only fill CDPR's pockets before you get the game. I bought a preorder once last year, after seeing the state of the merch store I cancelled it. Same thing happened again when I preordered a week before release hoping the situation changed. After contacting the gog support I was told there's nothing to do about it. They even followed up with a comment saying the discounts are limited and don't apply to interesting merch even. What a joke. I just didn't bother in the end. I literally want to support the game, get some cool overpriced merch and you're making it difficult for me.
Though I considered to get another refund after finishing the game to be honest. But whatever, 50£ is not much for me and I will wait for patches and expansions, that being said I totally understand people that want refunds.

PS 2 about console versions:
This is a joke at best. I've seen PS4/XOne gameplays and the game is not playable on that hardware. Yet people pay the same price as me for PC version and we were told the game runs great on them. Sure, the hardware just can't handle the game even after so many cuts. But why release it on it and lie about it then? CDPR blocked any console reviews before release and we can see why. They knew what they were doing, this is so bad I wouldn't be surprised to see a lawsuit against them and honestly they should get one. No excuses to be made here, this is a major fuck up.

 

[PyrateLV]

You farmed most of the development of this game off to some Affiliate Company.
Sure the Main and Side Stories are created by CDPR, but everything else seems like a Junior Development Team worked it

This game is made by the same people who made The Witcher 3? Really?
I dont buy that for a second. Its got the smell of "Intern" all over the place

*This is all just My Opinion*

 

[DerinHalil]

To start with a short summary of what the game is: fantastic parts that no other game can match in cyberpunk genre, but at the same time it feels like an early access game being sold for 60$ as a finished product. The game nails parts that Witcher 3 did for the most part but there's no evolution and even regress in some parts.
I know CDPR will fix a lot but I don't know how much exactly. The game should have never came out in this state anyway. I have a feeling it should be released in 2021 and old consoles scrapped completely, I know now barely anyone has PS5 but a year from now it would be a more reasonable idea.
CDPR did it with W3 already which skipped ps3/x360 and should have done the same here. In 2020 it wasn't feasible, so yet another reason to delay the game.

Some great things the game delivers:
Visuals - Night City looks amazing if you have the hardware for it. Nothing else comes close. Sometimes I would just drive around and admire the views, taking screenshots with the photo mode (nice addition too)

Main story - The beginning feels rushed, but by the end of act 1 I was hooked 100% and played until 7am. This happened again in act 2. Whole time I wanted to know what happens next and I was really invested.

Side quests - Some side quests are so good they feel like they should be part of the main story. Johnny, Judy, Peralez, River quests were great to just name a few. I randomly found some good side quests by exploring the map too, a few hilarious ones too.

Characters - Again here the game excels like Witcher 3. I will remember Johnny Silverhand, Jackie, Judy, Panam, Viktor, Misty, Takemura, Evelyn and plenty of others. Really well done, complex characters with good stories to tell and motivations.

World and lore: The world of cyberpunk is fascinating, and there's tons of lore for anyone willing to explore. We only have night city and depth in terms of lore is amazing. We got so many unique factions with different motivations. I felt wanting to learn more all the time, what happened in the years past, what is going on in other places in the world, lots of potential for sequels or prequels.

Soundtrack - feels on point very often, nails the cyberpunk feel especially in some main quest segments.

But...
Visuals are not perfect - details pop in all the time when driving, LOD is even worse than Witcher 3 in some places and that was a major complaint. You can see 2d cars in the distance that look comical. Even worse in badlands, I can see details spawning 20m in front of me. But also noticeable in city when driving fast.

I'm playing on a fast SSD, 3900X, and 16GB RAM, the game barely uses 3-5GB of my RAM. My GPU has 11GB VRAM, game doesn't use that. I get console limitations but is it really so hard to make it more scalable or just exposed in configs for enthusiasts with strong PCs? Ok, I know it's hard. But it's doable and something you should do as a major studio. You're no longer a 100 dev team with one small studio in Warsaw.
As a programmer I know for a fact you can query available RAM at any time through windows API so no excuses there please.

Story is great, but there's just not much of it - we get 3 acts in theory, in practice it feels like prologue, act 2, epilogue. I know the official explanation but I think CDPR got it completely wrong. W3 main story wasn't too long, it was just that side quests were more interesting past some points. W3 felt rushed after finding Ciri and lacking in that part, that was a common complaint. Only HoS later and BaW fixed that issue to some extent by giving more story content. I think CDPR got completely the wrong idea about why players were not finishing the main quest and rather than learning from mistakes from W3 went the opposite direction and cut it even further. It feels like a step back rather than improvement over W3. (where main quest wasn't the best part by no means) I thought I'm in 1/3rd of the story and the game ended 3h later. Another thing is, most endings come down to picking up some options in the last quest, except some that require you to finish some side quests in a correct way. But these are the side quests that I felt should be main story. There is also this dissonance between main story and the game. After act 1 we're being rushed to complete the main quests as soon as we can while we do 30 side quests and 1000 gigs. It just doesn't work. CDPR got away with it in Witcher 3 where it was similar, but here it just doesn't work.

The world is superficial, it looks beautiful but once you take a closer look you realize there's nothing to do in it outside of quests. We have gyms, food vendors, tons of NPCs etc. All are just decorations, no way to interact with anything.

Sound - while "main soundtrack" is very good, radio stations feel extremely limited, should have more stations and variety, more sounds. Many songs feel like 2020 and not 2077. In general radio doesn't even come close to GTA and lets not pretend this game is unrelated to GTA.

Interesting but half done ideas
Rogue AIs, blackwall - great ideas, we barely get a glimpse of a fascinating part of the world that I wanted to see more of.
Badlands - almost nothing to do there, few quests and that's it.
We have all these interesting gangs and factions in Night City and do nothing with them, they come down to being enemies to shoot in scripted encounters or for bounties. With some exceptions, but in general this is a disappointment.

Something on gameplay... Keep in mind I played focused on hacking, though also invested perks in crafting, reflexes, cool.
Good parts:
Lots of fun with hacking, every mission has tons of objects to interact with.
Several ways to approach each mission, you can be a netrunner just hacking 100% of the time, you can be hulk or samurai running with a katana or mantis blades, you can focus on on powerful handguns like johny, or a mix of everything.
Some cool ideas for weapons.
Skill trees are a huge improvement over w3 and there's a lot of fun to be had with different builds.
Some cool implant ideas. Mantis blades, kerezhnikov etz.

Issues with what is there:
Hacking
Should be more fleshed out, the minigame we have is cool but gets tiring halfway through the game, if we're going with minigames ME2 at least had a few different ones, should be more variety.
Not enough quickhacks, I ended up using 2-3 most of the time and I focused on a netrunner build with INT and perks into it.
Weapons
There's plenty of weapons in the game but many feel the same and that's a problem when you focus on one skill tree. Personally I focused gun skills on rifles, we have like 3 assault rifle types, each model falls into one of these types and there's no real difference between them that you can feel. I thought we will get more as the game progresses but no, that's all there is. No different modes for guns either that would add variety. Some even look almost the same if not completely the same. Add-ons system (scopes, muzzles etc.) are cool but why can't we change them quickly from the weapons menu? Mods I understand, but that should be doable with add-ons. Other games did it way before. And why can't we even get a flashlight or some grips etc? Not to mention grenade launchers etc. Stalker had that over 10 years ago.
Implants
After we get the eye implant, every other one feels like buying a new gun at the store. There should be some sort of animation and more effect in appearance to really get the feeling we're becoming cyborgs pretty much. We do that with new weapons, why not implants? This is a major theme in the genre. Missed opportunity to explore cyberpsychosis by player as well. Then there's the fact implants are limited as well. Should be more variety, I left some slots unused because it didn't really matter for me to get some implants. And we can't even get anything like night vision or maybe thermal vision which is silly.

Missing and broken parts
Crafting doesn't feel finished. We barely get any schematics. Upgrading isn't good enough, at first I thought I can use it to keep my good looking armor but it only gets you so far. It doesn't change the value of the gun either, feels there's tons of issues with economics.
No customization for crafted items, random stats? Another half done feature.
Driving is horrible. There are some exceptions like caliburn or jackie's bike but overall it's just not good. Feels more like riding a horse than a car, or driving on ice. Not even sure how to describe it. Devs got feedback from it on the first trailers, I even remember talking about it on my interview with them in late 2018. Nothing was changed it seems. Every ride needs tons of space to turn at higher speed and it just doesn't feel right when driving around. I noticed I got used to it at first few hours and it didn't bother me so much after that, but I think that may be the reason why it is like that. Devs got used to it and couldn't see the problem anymore. Just a wild guess. I didn't expect a race sim game of course, but every GTA game I can remember had better driving that is not even close to cyberpunk.

Loot system
When I can get rare weapons worse than common ones, something just feels off. There's no point in buying guns or armor, you quickly find something better by looting. Another example of broken economics.

Tutorials
Game fails to explain it's features, I often had to look up how to do something on google, or to understand how some mechanic works. Took me a while to get hacking even. And that was my focus from start, hell I'm even a programmer with some reverse engineering knowledge irl lol. Games like shadow of war handled it way better.

UI:
Game just doesn't show me information I need very often. How many rounds in a magazine does each weapon have? What kind of fire mode does it have? What is the range? Which mods go where? Who knows...

Broken or missing stuff in general
Bugs and crashes
No game should be released in this state. This is sadly now a standard in AAA games but even here Cyberpunk stands out, that's how bad it is. It's one of the worst releases in that regard I can remember. Witcher 3 had problems at launch but it was nowhere this close.
At first I didn't get many and the ones I got were funny glitches at best. As I continued to play the game I started to get way more and more immersion braking or a few progression breaking ones.
99% of the time save and reload fixed it but it just takes you out of the game. I stopped counting how many crashes I got after the first act. Game is just unstable.

Lifepaths are a joke
The way they were portrayed in promo material everyone expected MUCH more than what we got. Fans spent tons of time discussing them and planning their playthrough around them. In the game they feel like an afterthought shoved in close before release. For a brief moment I got my hopes restored when I received a side quest related to them. Only to be disappointed after 2 dialogues and 1 fight. Whole thing took 5 minutes including driving to the target. Besides that all we get is 20 minutes of cutscenes at the start and some dialogue options later that most of the time don't even make a difference giving just a false illusion of choice. We were told they will increase replayability. They don't. They don't matter at all. We have one character who is a street kid no matter what we do. Dragon Age did it better - in 2009 on a way smaller budget and more origin stories. Sure, you ended up in grey wardens no matter what but initial story was longer, had more impact on later game, even the endings.

All that focus on clothes and style in marketing has nothing to do with the game
Npcs have distinct styles, the player often ends up grabbing random equipment with better stats - sometimes I had a really cool armor but found something 3x better in stats and it was difficult not to switch. Or if I didn't the game got way harder, even with the armor implants. Nice looking armor is just hard to find. This should be solved by more armor implants to choose from.

Ai for crowds and police
Crowds are decorations, they were more interactive in GTA San Andreas released on PS2. Not much to say there.
Cars move on rails, AI is non-existent. They won't move through obstacles, just stay there. Even if I park on the sidewalk with 10cm of my car standing out I will cause a traffic jam because the AI can't drive around that.
Police is broken, no other way to describe it. Spawning 2m from the player and not chasing him. After you run for 50m you're covered, police has no problems with you. Bounty system should work both ways, NCPD is corrupt so let us buy out ourselves if we fuck up something. Until we do send some bounty hunters after us if we managed to escape the police.

Character creator
Extremely limited and you can see why - there's no point in it, we don't see V almost at all. If we did, we don't even have a way to customize our looks. Whole thing looks like a marketing ploy to get headlines about genitals customization. It's hard to even get anyone decent looking. I would rather play with cool looking V from the trailers. Why not just have them as defaults like Mass Effect? Default Shepard looked great both male and female, and if you wanted a custom one you could get one. Default V looks cool both male and female too. You already had the assets, why drop them? Implants don't change appearance except for mantis blades and hand ones. No way to even get a haircut later. It's 2077, we should be able to do ridiculous things for customization and what we have is more limited than Witcher 3. That's another missed theme of the genre too I feel. We get that explored through NPCs but not the player...

False advertising
What we saw in the trailers and materials was cherry picked, these parts are great but rest of the game is not like it. Game was hyped up by developers as a revolutionary thing. It's nowhere close to that except maybe the huge city and visuals. I've seen some senior devs on twitter blaming it on unrealistic expectations but that just isn't fair. All my pre-release exposure to the game was official promo materials, and I got the same impressions as what to expect as many others did. Marketing created the unrealistic expectations, no one else.

To wrap it up:
Playing the game I feel like it was terribly mismanaged. Some parts are greatly detailed, some are barely there just to have something. I don't know how development looked like but clearly something went terribly wrong. This is a good game at the end of the day, but not the innovation everyone was expecting, CDPR really tries hard to maintain this image of the good guy among dev studios but they're just the same as everyone else, only difference being good PR. Until this release at least. What we got was an unfinished product, and even if we ignore bugs it's simply not what the marketing showed us.
Last time I was disappointed with a game like that was with ME Andromeda. And CP77 is definitely better, but also we were told to expect much more than with Andromeda.
I was cautiously optimistic all the time before release and I knew people were overhyping the game too much. I kept saying that as long as it's as good as Witcher 3 I will be happy. But it isn't. Copying the same stuff from a game released five years before doesn't make the new one as good, you need to evolve. CDPR did evolve between W1-W2-W3 and every game was different. Here I don't get that feeling.
I think a fair score for the game at this point is 7/10. Good game, definitely above average (I'm not using the IGN's 6-10 scale here, proper 1-10 scale) But to say it again: this feels like an early access game with all of the implications like bugs and features still being developed (hopefully), not a finished product. With a ton of patches and some DLCs it's definitely a potential for 8. I'm not sure about 9 (that would be my score for Witcher 3 GOTY), it would need some rework of the lifepaths and more content in the main story for that.
Major disappointment and a fitting end to 2020.

PS of my personal experience related to the game:
Handling of preorders on gog was terrible. I wanted 100% of my money to go to CDPR. You get a time limited discount for the merch that was out of stock and there was no way to preorder anything. You get nothing from preordering the game, you only fill CDPR's pockets before you get the game. I bought a preorder once last year, after seeing the state of the merch store I cancelled it. Same thing happened again when I preordered a week before release hoping the situation changed. After contacting the gog support I was told there's nothing to do about it. They even followed up with a comment saying the discounts are limited and don't apply to interesting merch even. What a joke. I just didn't bother in the end. I literally want to support the game, get some cool overpriced merch and you're making it difficult for me.
Though I considered to get another refund after finishing the game to be honest. But whatever, 50£ is not much for me and I will wait for patches and expansions, that being said I totally understand people that want refunds.

PS 2 about console versions:
This is a joke at best. I've seen PS4/XOne gameplays and the game is not playable on that hardware. Yet people pay the same price as me for PC version and we were told the game runs great on them. Sure, the hardware just can't handle the game even after so many cuts. But why release it on it and lie about it then? CDPR blocked any console reviews before release and we can see why. They knew what they were doing, this is so bad I wouldn't be surprised to see a lawsuit against them and honestly they should get one. No excuses to be made here, this is a major fuck up.

ok lol

 

[Murzinio]

This game is made by the same people who made The Witcher 3? Really?

Nope. Many devs that worked on Witcher 3 left as soon as the work was done if I remember correctly.

Post automatically merged: Dec 19, 2020

ok lol

I made it a separate thread but some mod here decided it's a brilliant idea to merge it into this one so it gets buried under all one line comments bullshit.

 

[DerinHalil]

Nope. Many devs that worked on Witcher 3 left as soon as the work was done if I remember correctly.

Post automatically merged: Dec 19, 2020

I made it a separate thread but some mod here decided it's a brilliant idea to merge it into this one so it gets buried under all one line comments bullshit.

it's just me man, from the server, I don't care where you post

 

[manimusprime]

I am enjoying this game though I feel there could be a lot more. The world interaction is limited to only being able to shoot folks and steal their stuff because a fixer told you to. I really wish you could do things like car customization, card games, haircuts, sit at bars, dance in clubs, and travel companions. Other than that the game is a solid 7/10 but add those features and it's an easy 10/10.

 

[TigaShout]

You farmed most of the development of this game off to some Affiliate Company.
Sure the Main and Side Stories are created by CDPR, but everything else seems like a Junior Development Team worked it

This game is made by the same people who made The Witcher 3? Really?
I dont buy that for a second. Its got the smell of "Intern" all over the place

*This is all just My Opinion*

Dont take what I say for a fact now as it as I simply can't confirm if this newsletter can be trusted. But I read that the devs themselfs saod that they needed more time and that the deadlines the company set always have been too short.


Source:

Cyberpunk Game Maker Faces Hostile Staff After Failed Launch