CDPR devs intended at one point for each life path to dictate your build. Because interestingly if you look at the attributes and perk trees they fall into three character builds. Netrunner, Solo, and techie which were all real character classes in CP2020. They later changed this (most likely) to be more accessible and allow players to get all content through a single lifepath.
Now look at lifepaths. SOLO for STREET KID, Netrunner for CORPO, and TECHIE for NOMAD.
NOMAD you wouldn't know how to do much hacking meaning you would rely heavily on using your tech to build powerful weapons and open doors or alternate paths.
CORPO you would hack mostly everything and be extremely passive in how you interact with enemies.
SOLO you would rip open doors relying on combat power and direct action.
CDPR made it so you can be your own class which is nice but also creates the issue you are all complaining about.
every life path seems pretty much the same. Well duh, if you're playing a SOLO type class in every life path
(which was at one time only intended for a STREETKID) you're going to have a very similar experience.
I've been role playing this way since I played the game.
Which is why a lot of your experiences I just don't get.
I'm a CORPO, I suck at direct combat. I go down in seconds if
I try to take on enemies head on. Which makes stealth for me
super fun because if I mess up, I barely make it out alive half the time.
I also run into many doors I can't open because my tech is too low.
I didn't get Johnnies car because I made a bad decision and and didn't
have another attribute to lean on because I was sticking to my netrunner class.
All my decisions felt like a corpo because my skill checks matched my corpo life path.
And whenever I had a decision I made it within a corpo mindset.
I think some of you are sucking the enjoyment out of this game because
you're not actually role playing. You're being your own V which is fine, but because
you're specing into everything and reading guides you're basically cheating and opening
all content by basically knowing how to spec your character to get all the goodies and
advantageous situations to occur.
I didn't do this. My next run through the game will be extremely different because I will no longer be able to hack
a camera or set someone on fire from 50 meters away parked in my car across the street. But who knows, maybe
I finally might not go down like wet paper lol and I'll see how much fun it is to run around parkour style doing style kills as I
rip and tear through gangers in my SOLO STREETKID run.
I definitely agree that you get the most out of CP if you roleplay it and also if you play by the "rules" or what to say, it doesn't take much to screw up the game and it bugging out.
How you build your character I think is less important. The beginning of the game is without a doubt the hardest part as progress through it, it doesn't really seem to matter much which path you take, maybe with the exception of trying to go melee, if you have done nothing to spec for it. In my playthrough I spend almost all points in crafting and first later on started adding stuff to other skills. It didn't really seem like it made a whole lot of a difference and I played on very hard. But were still able to snipe people for 4-22k damage, one shot all enemies except bosses, where you are not allowed.
When I started the game the first time without really knowing anything about it. I wanted to solve things through dialogs and combat to be the last resort. At least that was my intention, however quickly figured out, that it was not really that type of game as I thought it was and that I would have to go all out combat first and dialogs wouldn't really matter much or at all. But nonetheless, I did basically nothing in regards to optimizing my character, I played most of the game not wearing headgear, because I didn't like the look, my gear in general weren't optimized, again because I would rather be able to look at my character without laughing than having good stats.
So given the fact that I hardly did anything to optimize my character, you don't need to look up guides of how to spec, because for the most part it comes down to gear anyway. The skills gives a little bonus, but at least in my experience, even from the start of the game, I weren't very excited about levelling up, like you can be in some RPG games, where you get new skills and abilities etc.
Getting +5% damage to pistols if you hit for 50 damage, means that you would now deal 52.5 damage instead, that doesn't really make me all that excited. Then you have skills like being able to hack turrets, never figured out why someone would take it or what it is actually used for? I didn't have it and have no issue taking them over, even manually control them etc.
But I do think that you play the game the correct way and is how you get the most and best experience out of it, rather than just playing it as an action shooter game, despite it actually being that. So in that regard you can have a lot of fun in the game, I just wished that the game were a lot more of an RPG than an action game.
