Since pretty much everybody has posted about every possible aspect of the game, I will just focus on one minor nuissance that I think CDPR should tackle in a subsequent game (i'm not even going to ask for DLC and/or expansion): you should focus who is the target audience that you want to sell your game and accept you are not going to be able to satisfy EVERYBODY. If you try that, you are going to have more people unhappy.
I'm not going to complain about cybergta,sandbox,infinite branches,turn based or skill checks but of two design decisions that try to made everybody happy and I think they backfired:
-Clothing and armor: your source material has a nice table that states that full combat gear protects more than a kevlar made bikini. The way its implenented in CP2077 (clothing + mods) you wanted to satisfy two different kind of gamers and ended with both sides dissatisfied: people is asking for transmog and theres people who don't see why guards are in full battle armor and not in casual dress (at least on fridays).
-Character characterization/leveling(no,the character is not a 3D rendering is all those numbers): I was not expecting a translation if Interlock or Fuzzion tabletop systems, since i understand that combining 1st person real time with aiming stats(reflexes+gun skill) can create player frustation (i'm hitting the target and my bullets don't register!), i would have liked some dialog gating by skills but i understand most people don't like that (so its my problem to play other games searching for that).
But the real problem with the system is not what is used (attributes,skills,perks) , the problem is that you get too many points(or too little for others) in attributes and perks(70 in attributes and 80s to 110s in perks?) which causes that when you reach lvl50 talking about builds is a little bit fuzzy... on top of that you provided a perk reset item and later by popular demand directly reset at character screen.You still have people asking for attribute and skill reset and people complaining that they cannot max out everything.
Basically the level cap and limit of attribute/perk points is so high that build planning is not sensical for some and too restrictive for others.
I don't want to go about "this is/is not RPG" or "RPG depth" and i don't want to self-cite my own half-joke post about what is a RPG. The point is, the same way that for story a consistent decision regarding the endings was done (no happy forever,win all...which was not a popular decision for all) there are parts of the mechanics that i think nobody dared to take that decision in order to try to hit a wider gamer base, which i think ended up not making anybody happy at all.
I'm not going to complain about cybergta,sandbox,infinite branches,turn based or skill checks but of two design decisions that try to made everybody happy and I think they backfired:
-Clothing and armor: your source material has a nice table that states that full combat gear protects more than a kevlar made bikini. The way its implenented in CP2077 (clothing + mods) you wanted to satisfy two different kind of gamers and ended with both sides dissatisfied: people is asking for transmog and theres people who don't see why guards are in full battle armor and not in casual dress (at least on fridays).
-Character characterization/leveling(no,the character is not a 3D rendering is all those numbers): I was not expecting a translation if Interlock or Fuzzion tabletop systems, since i understand that combining 1st person real time with aiming stats(reflexes+gun skill) can create player frustation (i'm hitting the target and my bullets don't register!), i would have liked some dialog gating by skills but i understand most people don't like that (so its my problem to play other games searching for that).
But the real problem with the system is not what is used (attributes,skills,perks) , the problem is that you get too many points(or too little for others) in attributes and perks(70 in attributes and 80s to 110s in perks?) which causes that when you reach lvl50 talking about builds is a little bit fuzzy... on top of that you provided a perk reset item and later by popular demand directly reset at character screen.You still have people asking for attribute and skill reset and people complaining that they cannot max out everything.
Basically the level cap and limit of attribute/perk points is so high that build planning is not sensical for some and too restrictive for others.
I don't want to go about "this is/is not RPG" or "RPG depth" and i don't want to self-cite my own half-joke post about what is a RPG. The point is, the same way that for story a consistent decision regarding the endings was done (no happy forever,win all...which was not a popular decision for all) there are parts of the mechanics that i think nobody dared to take that decision in order to try to hit a wider gamer base, which i think ended up not making anybody happy at all.