My friend who played on PC basically told me the exact same thing. It runs smoothly on his gaming setup, but the game is too linear with pretty much zero replay-ability because of how shallow the world is. It's clear they left a _lot_ out of the game. Even features that would seem "basic" for an open-world game, like AI, are apparently very awful (cops just spawning randomly right around you but they don't chase you and oddities like that).

While the console issues themselves are huge, it definitely seems the game itself is missing way too much for what it costs.

I think the issue is that a lot of people are trying to play this game like a cyberpunk GTA, which it just isn't, just like Witcher wasn't a medieval fantasy GTA. I see people going on a murder rampage in cyberpunk and then complain that the police chase that spawns isn't sufficiently realistic. Like......I don't feel like that's how this game should be played, just like it wasn't how Witcher was meant to be played. It's an RPG where the cyberpunk city is a background to an amazing story, it's not an open sandbox like GTA is.

And no replayability? The depth of character development is huge, that alone is worth another playthrough, would love to build a character that's built differently than my current one. And most missions support a huge variety of outcomes depending on decisions you made earlier and how you behave. If that's not replayability....then what it?

>The depth of character development is huge, that alone is worth another playthrough, would love to build a character that's built differently than my current one. And most missions support a huge variety of outcomes depending on decisions you made earlier and how you behave.

I'm about 15 hours into a second playthrough and this is just patently not true. There isn't much variety in character building outside of combat mechanics, you pretty much always play the same V as far as narrative and dialogue goes. I was doing a second playthrough just to see how different things could be and intentionally looked for dialogue I hadn't seen the first time, my experience was that it showed how on-rails 99% of the experience is. At this point, I'll pick it up again in a year or two when they've added some content and hopefully fleshed out the open world somewhat.

>I see people going on a murder rampage in cyberpunk and then complain that the police chase that spawns isn't sufficiently realistic. Like......I don't feel like that's how this game should be played

I mean, then why are you able to go on a murder rampage and get in a police chase? It's just a basic level of competence that the game doesn't have. Park your car in the street and come back after the mission to find a huge traffic jam because the AI is incapable of driving around your car. Accidentally hit a civilian during a shootout with the local gang? Cops will just spawn 10 ft away from you and continue spawning until you die unless you get in your car and drive for 15 seconds.

Maybe you're lucky and the way you play doesn't expose you to a lot of the things people are complaining about but it seems kind of silly to dismiss complaints of game mechanics as "you're doing it wrong".

I think a lot of people are under the false impression that any of your "choices" in the game actually affect the outcome, and they think that during second or third playthroughs they will be able to unlock a different experience...

Unfortunately they're wrong... the game very cleverly designs some of the dialog or mission choices in a way that makes it seem like your choices affect the outcome, but in the end there is only one single choice in the entire game that affects the ending. And even for the side missions and other dialog, it turns out that almost every single choice will direct you to the exact same path/outcome anyway. They might give you very slightly different dialog responses from the NPCs, but that's about it.

All of the "choice" in this game can be summed as:

Character asks you to do something. Your responses are:

1) Sure, I'll do that

2) Sure, I'll do that but my response is going to be snarky

3) Sure, I'll do that but you need to give me more information first

4) No, I don't want to do that, but you're going to tell me that I can't refuse you so I'll end up doing it anyway

5) No, I don't want to do that right now but you'll message me later and I'll find out that I can't progress any further without calling you back and saying yes

It's very shallow "choice", and I personally don't get any entertainment from that level of "replayability".

>>Maybe you're lucky and the way you play doesn't expose you to a lot of the things people are complaining about but it seems kind of silly to dismiss complaints of game mechanics as "you're doing it wrong".

I think you're probably right, I'm 25 hours in and I haven't been in a single fight with police other than one scripted side mission. That's kind of what I meant - in GTA I just start going on a rampage randomly because it's a fun thing to do, seeing how the city reacts around you. In Cyberpunk I just haven't felt the need at all, there's too much focus on the story.

It has a Wanted system like GTA. The comparison is accurate.

Most character skills are damage addons. If you don't pick assault rifle, your going to have a pretty slow time. Crafting is pointless, augments are just another skill tree.

'The way it's meant to be played' was the same apologetics we got with No Man's Sky on launch. Like three people wanted to play NMS as an empty grind-a-thon in a chill atmosphere that goes nowhere.

Cyberpunk failed to finish development. We all know it, why the rub?

I haven't played the game but I've seen a lot of their trailers. The original announcement trailer was all about police bringing in a cyborg person who went on a killing spree. Granted, that trailer is most of a decade old now, but their recent marketing is similar. I just saw a commercial saying something like "nothing is illegal in Night City... As long as you don't get caught". Even though it was coolguy marketing fluff, I assumed that the police AI would at least be at the level of 15 year old Grand Theft Autos

Blame CDPR’s marketing, not the consumers. Have you seen their marketing efforts recently?

Of course, I'm just saying that it doesn't seem to me like the game should be played this way, so I'm not surprised those who try are having a bad time.

It doesn't seem to you like the game should be played in the way they reinforced and strongly & continuously advertised?

And you're wondering why people are angry? It's your prerogative to cut CDPR as much slack as you wish, but let's not pretend that those who don't do that are in the wrong.

They marketed it as a game that could played that way, so it's on CDPR for setting incorrect expectations, not on the people playing for doing what the marketing told them would be part of the fun.

At the same time, cops not acting like cops, or spawning right in front of you, is a problem.

The game was not advertised as Cyberpunk Witcher. It definitely was advertised with a huge focus on the open world.

> I think the issue is that a lot of people are trying to play this game like a cyberpunk GTA, which it just isn't

I am 41 hours in and it definitely feels like cyberpunk GTA. Very much so.

They shouldn't have said it would a cyberpunk GTA then.

They literally said immersive huge open world in their marketing videos. If you say open world, you're comparing yourself to Grand Theft Auto 5, and you goddamn well better deliver.

They didn't and now they're suffering.

Now that is something that I would pay good money for, a steammpunk GTA, an artdeco GTA or a synthwave neon GTA (though a new Vice City will do).

It’s crazy because the Witcher and Skyrim (content, not bugs) didn’t have this problem with an equal amount of development time or less. The amount of content in the base Skyrim is still staggering, even if it had content cut. I wonder what happened here for it to fail in this aspect.

I don't know where the assumption that cyberpunk has little content comes from? There's a crazy amount of side missions and all missions support different outcomes depending on how you play. Skyrim I personally find frustrating because almost all missions are just shallow fetch/kill quests, even compared to Oblivion, Skyrim has loads of content and very little of it is interesting at all.

Bad open-world games are hard to develop. Good open-world games are extremely hard to develop.

> It's clear that they just didn't have time to implement like half the gameplay they promised.

Yup. From an art/style perspective, the game is top shelf and legitimately impressive. From a gameplay perspective, big parts of it are barely there.

It's like the opposite problem MGS5 had. That game had a great gameplay loop and well fleshed-out systems but it obviously lacked the assets to make the story work or offer much variety.

> they just didn't have time to implement like half the gameplay they promised

That's because they promised a time instead. You can promise a release date or you can promise features, but not both. Rarely both for a game this ambitious. It makes more sense not to hype a game up or promise a release date, and instead maintain power over when the release date is.

Gamers don't care if they get a game 18 months later, as long as it's better. They'll bitch and whine but they will always still buy the game. They're not going anywhere. Best to release a finished RPG late than release a half-assed one on some arbitrarily agreed upon date. Hopefully CDPR will learn this lesson, as countless other game developers have.

To me, the voice did not match the way characters were moving. It seemed very unnatural and not polished. Quite a big diff in sync between audio and video on my end.

I need to agree with you on this one, some of the NPCs throughout the story have terrible voice acting, but I can forgive it because they're a small part of the game. But the players' character is something that bothers me everything he speaks, it feels so emotionless, and often doesn't match the environment they're in.

Something I will never understand... your character never uses personal pronouns in reference to their self.

And I don't mean gendered pronouns, just pronouns like "I" and "We". It seems none of the characters do.

-

Instead of: "I need to get lunch"

It's: "Need to get lunch."

-

"We need to get in there, and we need to do it fast"

"Need to get in there. Need to do it fast"

-

"I'm tryin' alright?"

"Tryin' alright?

-

"I like chocolate"

"Like chocolate"

-

It's even more grating when you add in the forced sounding "Gruff Guy" voice the male V uses. I don't know what kind of weird tough guy vibe they were going for but it's like nails on a chalkboard sometimes.

Might have something to do with the fact that the dialogue was apparently originally written in Polish, which usually omits subject pronouns (they can be inferred from the verb form). If the translator was Polish, they might have carried that over to English.

(Noticed how I dropped ‘it’?)

I heard something like this, but I figured with a 100 million dollar budget and an A-list actor, surely they had editors who would catch an error made through out the entire game, right?

I wanted to believe it was a poor stylistic choice to go with the "gruff upstart" image, but yeah I guess it really just might be basic translation issues...

Playing the game in Polish feels weird... as if the dialogue was originally written in English and then hastily translated. It's nowhere close to the first-class feeling of Polish version of TW3.

That seems odd, because I saw a marketing video where they showed the band Refused working with an English language coach whose job it was to a) go over the lyrics and b) the singer's pronunciation/enunciation to make that in-game band that Refused is playing seem more of an authentically American band instead of a bunch of Swedish dudes.

Maybe that's how people talk in 57 years.

Leaving the personal pronoun out indicates more humility, and it could also indicate dissociation, like lying. It's ambiguous and/or contextual, though.

Something is definitely off with the voice acting in Vs' (male) voice, I can't quite put a finger on it, but most of the responses just don't match with the conversation that's going on.

Maybe that’s just how people talk in ‘77 Night City.

I haven't had too much to gripe about with the female player character voice acting thus far.

This. Why are people saying the game is good when the AI is simply bad? Without a good sense of immersion and real world simulation like police response time and behavior, how is this game arguably any good?

I think the vehicles have a scale problem vs the roads, and they implemented some odd road pieces that just restrict movement even more.

When you get a motorcycle it immediately becomes a lot better.

As to the world, I'd have loved a lot more interaction between characters in the world, and with you. They tried to make up for it by having a ton of people on the street, but even so it feels a bit empty.

But having said all that, I'm still having a great time.

> The result is a big beautiful and empty world with a linear path.

This may be the #1 reason why I don't play games anymore. Every game made in the last decade masquerades as open-world and turns out to be a linear path. Either wandering outside that linear path leads to a total void, or you get annoying game behavior forcing you to go back to the linear path, or you get bullshit like death timers.

This largely matches the recent narrative that "gameplay" should take a back seat to the story and art. Who would have thought.