This is a pretty long post, since it's all of my thoughts (or what I can think of right now) thus far on the new state of the game. I agree that CDPR went too far with changes and should have just left aspects of the game alone. For starters, what is essentially infinite stamina (out of combat), health and health items, and grenades. Sprinting, vaulting, and jumping out of combat now no longer require stamina. I find that to be immersion-breaking. Pre-2.0 patch, the base level stamina was already impressive, and you could sprint a good distance even before upgrading your stamina through leveling up and different levels of cyberware. Now, the bionic lungs that increased stamina are pretty much pointless, unless you get into extremely long firefights (if they're even still in the game - I haven't found them yet). But I do like that firing weapons depletes stamina - that was a creative move that makes sense when you consider how to control recoil.
Moving onto health - I have to say that I deeply dislike the reworked health system. Before (until you acquired certain perks), your health wouldn't regen out of combat - you had to eat food. I liked this because it increased immersion and made the food vendors more relevant. Now they're mostly pointless. You can always eat food right before a fight to give yourself a small health increase I suppose, but there are more powerful health boosters anyway. I also really do not like the health booster cooldown system. They should have just left the old health system alone - where the amount of maxdocs and bouncebacks you could use depended on how many were in your inventory. It encouraged looting and exploration. I suspect it was changed because people whined about being able to spam maxdocs or bouncebacks during fights - just like when people whined about there being too much stuff to pick up, so CDPR early on took away part of the incentive for exploration. Way back in the earliest days of Cyberpunk, you could grab a Grad early on a high-rise next to Victor's clinic. You couldn't use it without a body level of 10, but you could still get it - but that went away. There was an easy fix that could have been implemented by players and could have allowed the devs to leave the health system and loot locations alone: don't pick up stuff, and/or don't use the health boosters in firefights if spamming them makes it too easy. Same with what we had with grenades: don't want too many grenades in your inventory/don't want to spam them? Don't pick them up/buy them from merchants/craft them. The spamming argument is kind of moot anyway, as there is an animation that has to play out, whether it's throwing a grenade or using a health boost. So the rate is limited. There were plenty of times I was killed in the middle of using a maxdoc or bounceback - one time the animation finished, but my health bar hadn't refilled, so I took damage and died. Basic point - the grenade, health, and stamina system should have been left alone.
For crafting, I have to say that it is a major disappointment, when it comes to crafting components and therefore, so much else in crafting. The ability to buy crafting components from merchants should never have been taken out of the game. For weapons and cyberware tier upgrades, I see how they kind of mitigated it with auto-dismantling "broken" weapons you loot. But the resources you get from that are pretty minimal. Even dismantling higher tier weapons doesn't fetch that much compared to crafting higher tier weapons and increasing cyberware tiers. But for crafting quickhacks? It was a major mistake removing the ability to buy the components from merchants. I'm in the same boat with other people I've seen on here - I have the blueprints for a bunch of Tier 3 quickhacks, but I can't even craft one, because the only place I can get Tier 3 quickhack crafting components is from access points, or from crafting Tier 3 components from Tier 2 components. But, doing the math, it takes 30 Tier 3 crafting components to craft a Tier 3 quickhack. It takes five Tier 2 quickhack components to craft 1 Tier 3 quickhack component. So it takes 150 Tier 2 components to craft 1 Tier 3 quickhack. And there are 10-12 Tier 3 quickhacks. So that's 1,500 Tier 2 components minimum, from only crafting. True, you can get Tier 3 components from APs like I already said, but they amount you get is 15 Tier 2, 5 Tier 3 (and I'm in Act 2). So the crafting requirements just increase exponentially (i.e. for Tier 4 and 5 components), while the yields from APs decrease. As for health boosters and grenades, you can't even craft those anymore. As for upgrading equipment, I don't really have an issue with being able to upgrade only Legendary items. Long story short though, they should have just left crafting alone.
Now armor - I do think the system with cyberware armor is pretty cool. However, it should have been supplemental to clothing armor - not a replacement. Clothing (except for a few different pieces like visors, gas masks, netrunner suits, and ballistic vests, which offer minor buffs) is now completely pointless, as are clothing vendors. It doesn't offer anything. You could run through the entire game naked and it wouldn't make a difference. I honestly don't even know why clothing still has a quality aspect of Common, Uncommon, etc. Never have I ever played an RPG where clothing does not have an armor value. Even the Division games, and Outriders, which are looter-shooters, have armor values for equipment. It would have made much more sense to nerf clothing armor values somewhat and add the cyberware armor aspect so that there was a balance between the two and people wouldn't be super OP with armor. Overall, a terrible decision to remove the armor value from clothing.
Next, the attribute trees, skill categories, general xp, and street cred xp. Oh boy. First, I do like the inclusion of perks for vehicles, and the character perks in general seem pretty cool. However, I do not like the fact that you have to reach a minimum of level 9 in an attribute category before you can start to use the higher-level perks in that category. I like to form a kind-of jack-of-all-trades character. So I increase each attribute tree mostly evenly (with a small preference given to body and tech to access certain areas early on). Pre-2.0 patch attribute level requirements for perks didn't really matter that much, since you could start to branch out fairly early in each attribute tree and try different things at low levels. Now you have to either mostly sacrifice progressing some attribute categories or be almost halfway through the hard-level cap to level them evenly to level 9. I'm at level 17, and I only have three level 8 attributes, and two level 7s, so I'm still at the bottom-level perks for every attribute and won't be able to start using any level 9 perks until I'm level 20. If I were to continue this way, I wouldn't be able to use any of the level 15 perks in any category, and certainly not any level 20 perks. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue if we had a level cap of say, 100 and a NG+, but I'm not expecting either of those for a while. Oh well, I guess that's what mods are for. As for the skill categories, I'm in agreement that those should have been left alone, for the most part. It was much more fun before, having 12 skill categories to progress, instead of five that are kind of ambiguous on how you progress them. The only change(s) I would have liked to have seen for the skill categories would have been either to increase the skill xp yield for skill actions (i.e. getting more skill progression xp for athletic actions) or lowering the xp threshold requirements from one level to the next in the skill categories so that the skills could be progressed at a reasonable pace. Again, I like to progress all of the categories, so I wasn't running around the Pre-2.0 patch game with a shotgun, pistol, or rifle the whole time. For general character xp and street cred xp, either the xp yield for completing missions, gigs, police scanner missions, and getting kills needs to be reduced, or the amount needed to increase street cred level and character level needs to be increased. Even though I'm in Act II, I'm already level 17 and have a street cred of 21 - and I've only done 21 activities (gigs, side missions, story missions, police scanners, and cyberpsycho sightings combined, plus a few random encounters with enemy NPCs). I've barely cleared the Watson section of the map, and been nowhere else.
For weapons, I like the new tiered system - I like how the stats increase from Tier 1 to 1+ to 2 and so on. I also like that body requirements for weapons are no longer a thing. I think the new cyberware value approach is cool and interesting, with the possibility of becoming a cyberpyscho an element. I like the improved stats on weapons, their attachments, and cyberware as you increase their tiers. I generally like the quickhacking (though I haven't delved super deep into it). I think the quickhack stacking is a cool concept, as well as the traceability by enemy netrunners. I wouldn't have altered the effect of Reboot Optics, though. Before, it blinded enemies. Now, it just messes with detection and their aim a little bit. The only other issue I have with hacking is the AP minigame. The cyberdeck I'm running now supposedly has a buffer capability of six, but when I access an AP, it only gives me 5 buffer slots. So I don't get what the deal is with that. I enjoy the increased challenge with sword and fistfights. I wouldn't have made knife throwing an automatic perk, but I'm still enjoying it.
For vehicles, I like the autotrader kiosks, even if I haven't bought any cars from it yet, and I like the added camera view on vehicles. I'm really impressed with how much vehicle handling has improved, as well as the AI drivers in the game (for the most part lol). I like the gang car chases you can get into with or without police involved. And for that matter, the whole police response system is a great improvement.
In conclusion, unfortunately, I'm having a pretty hard time enjoying Cyberpunk as much as I used to. The devs just overhauled and changed so much that they should have just left alone or only changed a little. And then there are changes that should have happened that didn't. I'm still holding out and hoping that we'll eventually get a NG+ and increased hard level cap, and I'll see what PL is like, but right now, I'm leaning towards reverting back to the last pre-2.0 patch and installing a bunch of mods.
