Yes, they make a good open world but nothing in them feels substantive.
Well, nothing really feels substantive in CP2077, either.
Oh, look, you can fish! ...Well, that was fun for two minutes.
Now, this is somewhere that you and I definitely agree.
I haven't seen it much here, yet, but on the Steam forums, one of the biggest complaints is that Night City seems "lifeless".
It honestly took me a long time to figure out what they were trying to say, what they meant by that, cuz it seemed to me that the city was teeming with life. Sure, the NPCs were shallow-as-heck, but if one were to just stand in the middle of, say, Kabuki and look around, it's like being in a much more colorful Seattle.
But it seems what they mean is that there isn't enough to do, no casino games to play, no meal-eating animations at vendors, etc.
Now, me... I'm with you. Playing GTA, I mucked about in a casino for two seconds and then went back to shooting hookers and cops. I had money already. What's the point? I really don't get why people need these minigames so very much when they're just set-dressing.
Let's go talk to the NPCs! Oh, they're all incredibly non-reactive and one dimensional.
I can't name a single open-world RPG with NPCs who aren't incredibly shallow, even the named characters with full dialogue-trees.
Personally, I'm glad total strangers don't just start telling you their life stories after you waddle past 'em; it's so weird to have some rando on the streets of a city just say, with zero introduction or preamble, that their grandmother is sick. Sure, in a game we know that this means there is a quest to find whatever magic berries will cure granny, but in real life it would just be weird.
But in Night City, nobody says, "I used to be a netrunner like you, then I took a quickhack to the temporal lobe." It just doesn't happen.
And I actually really, really prefer it that way, one of the things CDPR totally got right was leaving out that immersion-breaking trope so common to, say, Bethesda.
If an open world just to goof around and RP in is what you enjoy then fair enough, but when comparing story and character Fallout 4 is...well, irredeemably bad in comparison.
I don't know about "bad".
The dialogue isn't as well-written or well-acted in F4 as it is in CP2077, I'll certainly agree with that. But "bad"...?
Plus, Fallout 4's plot branches in some pretty wild ways; that you ultimately have to choose an allegiance, thus changing the entire endgame is itself, alone, one way in which F4 is superior. I'm left wondering how things are different if I
don't join the Brotherhood of Steel, if I side with the Institute instead.
But CP2077 doesn't leave me wondering anything similar.
Sure, you have choices in some individual situations, but they all lead to the same end, ultimately.
Even modded to the nines I couldn't get invested in the plot.
For a lot of us, that's the appeal, actually.
I've got 171 hours in Skyrim, if Steam is any indication. And I've basically not followed the plot even a tiny bit; I just really like exploring the world.
For Fallout 4, I've got 409 hours (cuz sci-fi beats fantasy in any contest), and I never did finish the game (though I followed the plot far, far more than in Skyrim, cuz I
did find it interesting, far more than Skyrim)...I just loved wandering the wastes and seeing what I could find, what I might come across that was interesting or hidden.
But even then, many of those sorts of games will let you solves quests in any order, let you choose sides, let you build fortifications (which is actually why I never finished Fallout 4; they started telling me to build all of these forts on the map in order for them to all make one coordinated attack or something, and I just got super bored; it sounded less like play and more like
work) and there is so much freedom to make the adventure your own.
But with CP2077, you can't even give V a bleeping, censored
haircut, much less customize an apartment.
And the plot doesn't allow for choosing sides in a conflict, not in any kind of
big way, like if Maelstrom and the Moxes are fighting over something, you don't get to support one over the other and have that affect the future plot.
As wonderful as the dialogue and acting may be in CP2077, the story really is basically on rails, and not much can fix that short of a tear-down and redesign.