I want to preface my reply by saying I'm 50 and not much of an avid gamer these days as life does that for many my age but I had really and truly looked forward to this since its announcement a decade ago. Being of the age I am, "cyberpunk" was a real thing for me in the late 80's and 90's. I first read Neuromancer when I was 22. So to say all this was a very long time coming for me is an understatement lol.
Secondly, a bit of trivia here, Adam Adamowicz was a friend of mine. The name won't ring a bell for most people but he was the head conceptual artist for Fallout. We knew each other for most of the 90's and he left Denver to go back to Bethesda MD in 2001.. The rest is history as they say. Tragically Adam died in 2012 from lung cancer. He smoked, mainly American Spirits, and literally one of the last memories of conversation I had was telling him to quit. And lastly, in a final twist of fate he died on the day my son was born.. Feb 9th 2012.
On to CP2077. What can I say. I both love it and also take issue with a lot of various little things. It's definitely not what I expected or I'll say 30% expected 70% not. I simply feel like they failed to deliver on the hype despite it being delivered in other ways. As William Gibson himself said something to the effect of it being GTA-5. And after 30 hours I kind of agree. It's really just a lot of "run and gun" mixed with cut scenes. I do rather enjoy them however and have taken the time to explore all dialog. I've enjoyed the main story and missions to be sure but at the same time I always feel like there is just some intangible element that's missing.
I bought the game on pre-sale, paid full price, etc. I waited at least 4 months to install it after release and at the time only played 6 hours. I didn't get back to it because I figured Id just wait a bit for it to mature and have some updates. So I did a full reinstall (September 2022) and have jacked back in having just completed Act 1. I first spent at least 10 hours just doing a few side missions and picking fights to stockpile some eddies and buy some armor to prepare for the initial Malestrom battle. It was so much easier this time around than the first outing last year. (I'm playing on Normal mode).
To get to the brass tax, here's my objective criticisms; (and I assume some of these are basic ad nauseaums that many people have said)
- Increase "real world / life-like relaism". Overall I really wish there had been more subtle attention to detail and realism in many instances that prop up the suspension of disbelief. What I mean is even simple little things like when you go to take a shower (which is rather pointless really anyway) but if you're going to include something like this why not have a second or two where it appears as if you're taking your clothes off first. Something as simple as hands moving over the shoulders from first person. Having you just suddenly put your bare arms against a wall as if you're somehow already naked or taking a shower with your clothes on is just dumb and again.. pointless? Either do it right or just don't do it at all.
- Vehicle Realism / City Realism. I absolutely HATE the fact that there is literally nowhere to park except on sidewalks, many of which have rails and barriers. It just feels absolutely stupid to leave your vehicle in the middle of a street to then see you've created a traffic jam. This 100% kills the sense of reality for me. In trying to "keep it real" in some respect I do actually like to pull the car or cycle somewhere that is a parking spot. In short, each block should have a few parking spots. Hell, even some paid parking structures.. you know.. like the real world has would be cool. Park for 10 eddies! How in gods name was this so overlooked???
- The NPC's. My god.. Ohhh my god. I thought they were supposed to be fixed by now. In my first hour back in I saw at least two intermittent T-poses, a few floating people, people walking through walls, and a single character triple stacked on itself. Worst of all however is, because of the parking issue, their overdramatic screams even if just one NPC is bumped is completely rediculous. And it's not just one of them... all 100 or more for a 100 foot radius scatter like roaches. Same if you pull out a weapon. In a city where people are pulling out weapons on every block why should people suddenly scatter. Why not have them wait until shots are fired first!!! It's absolutely maddening. WHY!!!!
- Unrealistic Combatants. Hostile NPCs. Some can be almost naked yet take a long time to kill despite numerous headshots and or many of them in a street gang look the exact same. Total buzzkill to take out 8 of them and two or three are exact looking duplicates of the others. Just bad realism here. Really bad.
- Injury detail. If you just got into a huge fight and go back to the apartment you should be able to see some cuts and bruises on you. A minor request perhaps.. but still... realism.. realism.. realism.
- The Light rail / Subway. This game was 100% hyped with images of a subway and rail system. I'm beyond disappointed it doesn't have it. Had I known I would've bought it on sale this month instead or maybe wouldn't have even bothered. Having partially grown up in NYC as a kid.. this was huge for me.
- Parkour. This is something my 10 year old brought up. There should be some reasonable level of parkouring, especially as you level up body skills. If there is, my apologies, but I just don't see it. Take a nod from TRON Evolution.. 100% loved the parkouring in that game. So fun.
- Armor and Clothes. Your armour should not be attached to your clothes categorically. I feel like it should be its own category. You should be able to put on some body armour ..like arm bands, bullet-vest, etc under your clothes first, then other stuff on top or vice versa and actually see it. And I'm not seeing that at all. Seems like this would be obvious and is huge for realism.
- Purchasing Diversity. There should be a lot more diverse shops to buy stuff from at it should properly effect in game choices. I mean gun shops with ammo, hackware, drugs / med stores, etc. I really hate the fact that you just loot ammo, grenades, and health shots so much on missions alone. I'm certainly ok with looting off victims, but it's entirely unrealistic to constantly pick up a case of ammo in an alley or right before a battle begins. It's so 2005. Sure, have some stuff here and there at gang hideouts, but the whole default style of having the same exact loot absolutely everywhere totally kills realism for me. It's just repetative and booring. If I know I'm taking on a side job or main mission, I should have to think ahead and go to a weapons store and actually buy the ammo, grenades, etc, or go to a health/drug store to load up on meds and health regens. Again, picking up a little extra stuff on site at a gang hidecout can be realistic, but the defacto standard game-play seems like a default fall-back position to every other FPS game on the market. I was really hoping CP2077 would be a lot different in this respect.
- Real Word Jobs / Side Quests. It would be interesting if "V" was also allowed to have some sort of semi-normal profession to earn money too, not just from killing people, net running, etc. Imagine if he/she could choose some side missions where they worked at a bar or was a data courier or a mechanic. I simply think more diverse side missions / jobs with a non-violent nature could really add to realism, allow for a more personal and unique experience, and allow you explore more of Night City as an escape fantasy and not just be so "game" focused. I guess this is my more "open world" desire statement.
- Character Interactions. I have to say Act 1 was incredibly brief and I was very disappointed to see characters evaporate so quickly. It made the story arc feel incredibly rushed to me. I could give a lot of suggestions here but that's subjective story writing and could be endless theorizing that I won't do here.
As for the gameplay itself, I get that you're essentially a "run-n-gun" street thug / edgerunner that takes on jobs to level up skills, take on bigger jobs, bigger enemies, etc. And while I certainly expected that, I also expected something much more, idk, more open-world, more exploratory, more transcendental. And for something that took a decade to produce I'm left asking why it's not. So far, for me at least, it seems like it's a basic shooter with various hacker mods, spliced with a lot of long cut scenes. Thankfully it's pretty enjoyable overall, but at the same time, for me at least, there's just something really big missing in most aspects of reality and the open-world scenarios of what this could have / should have been. I'm still at 6/10 overall.
- Tutorials and Help. Lastly, I thought the introductory tutorials are pretty lacking for a noob like me. This obviously has a lot of complexity to it's menus and what all there is to do with leveling up and I haven't seen a lot in-game help or elswhere that gives a bullet point A-Z of how to play and get the most from CP2077. I'm sure the info is out there. I just feel it's not easily accessible. I shouldn't just have to rely on non-official You Tubers and the forum.