I think I've seen your comments somewhere else in the forum and I guess you somehow believe this game is pretty much good as is.
Either you are confusing me with someone else or you haven't seen enough of my posts. I love the game but I do not shy away from criticizing it's weaker aspects.
My position is nuanced. Is the game good? It sure is. The general consensus also seems to be that it is good. Judging from player reviews from anywhere the game is good - a 7+/10 pretty much everywhere. Does that mean that I think the game doesn't need improvements? Absolutely not, it does. Even after 1.5, which is a great step forward, there is still a lot of place for improvement. Notice how I didn't comment on the AI part earlier? I didn't say anything about the AI. I happen to agree that the AI still needs refinement.
At least that's the general vibe I get from you but I think simply adding these novelty things would keep players entertained for hours in the same way they do in those other aforementioned almost decade old titles.
I genuinely don't get how you are so certain that these "novelty" things are what keeps these old games popular for so long. GTA4 has pretty much disappeared from everyone's radar in favor of GTA5. What keeps GTA5 alive almost a decade later isn't these novelty things. It's GTA online and the constant updates and addition of
content. While a few might hang around in those activities, the rest are out there experiencing content or just causing mayhem.
Never once have I seen or even heard of anyone spending hours in GTA5's stripclub. If someone wants to, by all means, go ahead. To claim it's somehow a big attraction to all or even most players is wrong as far as I've seen.
Skyrim? Nobody is playing Skyrim a decade later so they can go into Whiterun and talk to Balgruuf for the 100th time. No one spends 2K hours in Skyrim only so they can go to Riverwood to hear Sigrid tell them to be careful with that fire because they're a mage. People play Skyrim for a thousand hours because you can spend a thousand hours in-game finding new places to explore, items, spells, etc. Throw in mods and you've got another 1K hours
easy. Sure, it's a fun little thing the first time someone reacts to you about X but after you've experienced it once, you've seen all there is to it. That's not what keeps people playing. Skryim isn't known for it's impeccable writing.
The "illegal achievements" statement feels pretty out of touch with the type of game you're playing...
How is it out of touch? The vast majority of your major achievements are illegal. You didn't bring down a dragon, you infiltrated Konpeki and stole the most valuable relic in existence.
Outside of unlocking new gear....explain to me what is the point of "street cred" or any of the cosmetics if no one reacts to you in the world.
"Outside of the point, tell me, what is the point?" is what I'm reading here. Could street cred be better implemented? You bet. I would've loved to see a much deeper system with possibly wide-ranging consequences affecting your standing with the different gangs/corpos but people going "Oh, look, it's V!" out on the streets I couldn't care less about and I'd bet most people don't care much for it either and would rather see extra content than that.
I know the folks are working their butts off at CDPR to recover this game but I just feel this is good feedback so they stay on the right track....and FYI everything in the game is technically "fake" so......
And I'm pretty certain they are on the right track and the right track doesn't include this kind of activity or NPC interactivity in my opinion. In fact, I'm certain of it because that was simply never the point of this game. Ever. That's not the kind of game CDPR makes. It never was meant to be a sandbox game. It was always meant to be a story driven game and I don't see that changing.
You are right, everything in-game is fake! That's not the point of what I said though. Yes, everything is fake, it's a video game after all. The thing is, I can't go out and commit some major heist in real life. I can't just take our my trusty .44 and go help the police to gun down gangsters. I can't drive at 256KM/H in the busy streets of a major city. I can go to a restaurant though. I can go to a club, a strip club or play darts, pool or just hangout with friends. Why would I care about that in my game when I can actually do it? Or, more importantly, how does that improve replayability more than actual content?
Ultimately, as
@Spockprime said very succinctly, it's never going to be what you want it to be. That was simply never the point of this game.