> But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X%

I am part of this group. I think the real reason for the drop off is just that their is not really that much to do in the game. You can 100% the game in 60-80 hours. If you are just trying to finish the main quest lines you can probably do that in about half the time or less if you are really beelining through it. The combination of the pandemic plus holiday shutdowns has resulted in a lot of people finishing the game and moving on.

Additionally, the sentiment that I have been seeing and agree with is that the game currently does not have any good endgame content. Once you play through the story and do most of the side quests, there is not a whole lot left to discover. The artwork is beautiful but aimlessly exploring has not been very enjoyable since NPC AI ranges from shallow to non-existent (e.g. completely broken police system, pot-shot or rush enemies, random cowering citizens, etc.). I am sure that CDPR has some DLC in the pipeline to change that but I don't plan to pick up the game again until a DLC release.

I had the same experience. Open world games should have emergent gameplay or fun side content. 2077 doesn't really have either. You can't lead the law on a merry car chase, like GTA. You can't steal into people's homes to find goodies or start a battle with the town folk like Skyrim. You can't play a chill game of Gwent with a nearby NPC. You can't build a neat base like in Fallout 4. You can't go fishing or pelt hunting like in RDR2.

There's just...nothing to do that isn't on a yellow quest marker dot. Nothing to explore and no AI to create rich, memorable experiences with. Just a gorgeous, puddle-deep map. An aquarium swimming with schools of brain-dead, filler NPCs.

It makes me wonder why CDPR even made 2077 an open world at all. You don't need one for a smattering of (superb) siloed missions/levels and cut scenes. That's a lot of extra work so players can...drive around the mostly empty world, I guess?

Who knows, maybe CDPR had a lot of features in mind and will deliver them to us through updates & DLCs. But as it stands, 2077 is billed as an open world and delivers a dead/static map.

I wouldn’t argue with much of this on the face of it but I think people forget that this is a single-player RPG, not some game-as-a-service designed to support an endless grind. The fact that people are working through the content (of which 80+ hours is plenty, IMO) and then setting it aside to wait for DLC is perfectly in line with my expectations of how people engage with a game like this. Maybe they invited the comparison with grindy looter-shooters by having looter-shooter-style loot, but at its heart it really isn’t that kind of game.

Fact is that right now criticism of this game will get engagement, so people are doing it with criticisms that sound spicy regardless of relevance.

I would agree with you with the caveat of their PS4 (console in generaly really) release. It's one thing to release something buggy and promise to fix it later... but that console release was more akin to a bait-and-switch. It was not playable and any product released that like deserves regulatory action. You can't sell something for $120 that does not work out of the box and take a "we'll fix it later" attitude.

>But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X% and lots of others stuff not typically reported about on a game.

Guess you missed coverage of flops like Battleborn and Evolve. Loss of player count is a pretty common stat in articles about games with a popular, if not prevailing, negative perception.

Note that that's not to say that CP2077 is a flop or mostly disliked.