I'm really enjoying the game, but I really want to leave some feedback about parts of the gameplay that bother me:
- LMGs and Shotguns are awful. Shotguns are so low range that they are basically melee weapons, but without any of the power of melee weapons. LMGs are just kind of crappy assault rifles. The thing I want out of an Annihilation build is really what an HMG provides, but you're not allowed to ever have one at the ready, you can only pick them up during missions, which is stupid. At least give me a perk that lets me pull one out of my trunk once every 10 minutes or so if I'm not allowed to just carry one permanently. Also it's stupid that there is only one LMG. At least give a second option that's slower firing but more damage per bullet.
- The boxing missions are impossible on Very Hard difficulty. I don't have any problem playing the rest of the game, I can fight Cyberpsychos and shoot or slash my way through hordes of enemies on Very Hard, even when using weapons I'm not skilled with, but the second I step into the ring I get knocked out instantly while the enemies have health bars a mile long. It's basically an absurd minigame where you have to play perfectly without ever getting hit for several minutes in a row just to win the easiest boxing match.
- General game balance is all over the place. There are some things that give gigantic bonuses, to the point where you can one-shot enemies with certain weapons, while other builds give absolutely pathetic bonuses. For example when it comes to clothing mods, reduced fall damage is in absolutely no way equivalent to bonus crit chance. A legendary crit chance mod gives +15% crit chance, that's incredibly powerful. Meanwhile other mods give some minor armor bonuses or things like carry weight or fall damage reduction which don't affect combat at all. Another example: legendary subdermal armor gives you +200 armor which is a lot in the beginning of the game, but progressively becomes less and less useful. This should just do something like reduce all damage taken by a percentage so it remains useful. There really needs to be a general balance pass on this game.
- Raising Athletics is too difficult if you're not a melee build. You have to stand around punching the air pointlessly for hours if you're not expending tons of stamina using melee attacks on a regular basis. Can this skill maybe go up from jumping and running a bit even when you're not blowing through hundreds of bars of stamina?
- It's silly that the Ballistics Coprocessor doesn't actually show ricochets until you mod your cybereye. Especially given that the game makes you get the Ballistic Coprocessor like it's some kind of big deal, but it's a complete dud of an implant unless you get the mod that shows ricochets. This needs to do something useful right out the gate.
- The clothing system is annoying, because it's extremely difficult to gather up an outfit that both looks good and has good stats. I would really like to be able to combine two pieces of clothing together to get the stats of one with the looks of another. I also don't like it that you have to wear a hat and a face piece to get more armor.
- It would be nice if you could edit your appearance after character creation, and include some of the more extreme cybernetics options that NPCs have in the options you can get later in the game.
- It would be nice to be able to choose to destroy an item to retrieve the mod, or spend some resources to extract mods. It's kind of sucky that you have to have 16 tech to retrieve mods from items. I should be able to hire an NPC to do technical things for me. This isn't a survival game where I'm punching trees alone in the wilderness, I have access to an extensive underground network of specialists.
- On the topic of crafting, it's honestly broken that you can make infinite money by buying items, breaking them down and selling what you craft from the components. It creates a situation where any character build that doesn't include a high technical skill is not even remotely on a level playing field. We're no longer talking about a play style choice like "How do I get around that goon over there?", we're talking about making a choice between having to scrounge for every eddie or being able to just click a few buttons to make millions of them.
- It would be nice if you either had to work your way up to legendary Cyberware by installing the lower grades first (Your brain needs to build the right neural structures to handle the really hot tech maybe), or you could trade in lower grade cyberware when you upgrade to something better. The way the game is set up right now it's not really enticing to buy anything other than legendary pieces, because you wind up replacing them and just wasting a ton of money. That takes a lot of the fun out of the early game, because you're constantly just thinking "That thing is cool, but it's a green, I better save for when I finally find a legendary version".
- Can we have an option to make the car try to turn toward where your mouse is pointing when you step on the gas? This is how Borderlands does Keyboard and Mouse driving while also allowing free look, and it works really well once you're used to it. The driving with Mouse and Keyboard is awkward in Cyberpunk 2077 because you just don't have enough fine control over how hard you want to steer.
I might find more gameplay gripes. I just wanted to talk about some problems with this game that aren't necessarily bugs, but just things that could be improved. Especially since I'm looking forward to seeing a multiplayer version of this at some point we'll need good balance in that.