I assume this is meant to say a game with a compelling narrative offering meaningful choices/consequences and branching is unrealistic. Let alone one using voice-overs, motion capture, etc. The reason I don't agree with this is because I've played a number of games incorporating both. None of them had garbage tier graphics either.
In fact, sections of CP provide both. The Pickup immediately comes to mind because the quest has meaningful choices/consequences and branching. As soon as I recognized it for what it was offering it was exciting. I thought this is a good quest. I sure hope the rest of the game plays out this way. Unfortunately the majority of the rest of the game didn't play out that way.
It's difficult to hold back disappointment when you see part of game done extremely well, and providing exactly what you were hoping, then see the rest fail to deliver the same level of quality. The fact this one section of content did so tells you it's possible. It places on full display the potential of the people putting it together. The rest of the content being as it is tells you they either didn't have the time or didn't care to build it up to the same standard.
My thoughts exactly. Plus having read testemonies about the game development, the stages at which it rebooted, it is a fair critissism to point out resources should have been alocated for more story content (branches). So if this final version of the game took 2-3 years of hard development one more year should be enough to add this content (or having started on this final version of the game one year before).
Pawel Sazco explained this on his chat. That with what they learned and having the systems and assets created it is much faster now to add content. The Red 2.0 concept also seems to accept the criticizm at their development practices and aims to correct them.
So I agree, they have the talent and resources to create branching narratives as in the pickup but didn't implement it on this title. And as Restlessdingo points out the beggining of the game suggests this will be the case, also with Evelyn asking us to cross Dex, (...) I felt like a detective merc that needed to pay atention to body language and text subtleties (and I do pay attention to enjoy the story more) in order to make the best "people choices", and that this would be an incredible game to replay. But as the game plays out these things matter less and less and we can see through the bluff/lack of implementation.