The game’s vitriolic reaction only really came about as a direct followup to possibly one of the most hyped up games this year.

My experience is that it’s a fun game with some minor problems. If you like cyberpunk books or media, you’ll love it. The writing team put a lot of effort into crafting a backstory of the world.

Overall it reminds me of the original Neuromancer novel; moments of sheer brilliance mixed with moments of tacky, embarrassingly bad writing. That specific quality is part of the genre’s history, to me, and I think a lot of the criticism toward 2077 is from people who haven’t read much of the previous books.

"Control was another game with "severe frame rate issues" on base PS4 and Xbox One consoles. While it started out well enough, it began dropping hard on combat sequences, even going as low as 10fps"

checks notes, never delisted despite shipping game playing at 10fps ....

I can tell you why I'm annoyed: I was a big CDPR fan, I loved all three of the (core) Witcher games, so I was hoping something to a similar level of quality. The fact that it wasn't isn't the problem though (especially bugs, which can be fixed), the problem is the CEO's lied, not just to us the customers, but also to their shareholders. They said a year ago that the game could be played from start to finish, but its now come out that devs are saying that was a downright lie. Shortly before release, they said that the game "performs better than expected" on base PS4/Xbox, which was also an outright lie.

I'm angry at the lies.

The game itself has problems: the AI is nonexistent (GTA 3 from 2001 had better car driving AI!), its buggy with regular crashes, physics glitches, audio glitches, quest-breaking bugs. The shooting is not terrible, but its nothing special. The hacking is just a menu with zero depth. Many missions are just "go kill the people" mundane affairs (sad compared to how great The Witcher 3's side quests were). There are characters that get built up and then you never hear from them again. Some characters quest lines feel very short. Few decisions have a lasting impact and the endings are almost all chosen through a selection in the last mission segment (very few prior decisions have any impact on it).

But with that said, the game isn't bad (bugs aside). The music is amazing, the voice acting is great, I found the characters likable, the attention to detail in some areas is fantastic (visiting peoples graves for example) and overall the main quests, especially the ones that were more talking to people than shooting, were really good. I legit felt heart broken at certain phone messages towards the end, they hit me right in the feels.

So its a flawed game with some great ideas and some good content. I feel that if they'd had another year of development time, it would have been an amazing game, but management rushed it out instead.

If I ignore the technical issues and judge the game purely on story, content, gameplay, then I'd give it a 7 to 7.5/10 (with technical problems I'd give it 3/10)

I've played it through once (and reloaded right before the end to see a second ending) and I don't regret buying it, I got my moneys worth. However, its nowhere near the hype their marketing promised and its nowhere near the quality that The Witcher 3 was.

The other big difference is the amplification by social media that's present for every pop-culture phenomenon makes the kerfuffle seem larger than it is. What passes for news media these days is mostly a large twitter echo-chamber.

I would bet 90% of gamers are like me. Disappointed in the launch, but definitely going to try the game once the main bugs are ironed out a few patches down the road.

More surprisingly to me is that people still give modern media any credibility whatsoever. I turned on NPR the other day and had to turn it off after 15 minutes. I can't imagine why anyone would listen anymore.