People were expecting GTA: Night City it was more of an open-world RPG. People are still butt-hurt about it.

Streamers were seriously running out and shooting the first civilian and were disappointed at the lack of police chases. Some people even complained about the car modeling realism (lack of traction when you drive one corner of the car over a bollard etc).

At its current price (25-30€ish sales everywhere) it's fully worth playing just for the story. It's not the best fighting game, it's not the best driving game, but the story is damn good and some of the endings really gut-wrenching.

Just the dive with Judy is something I haven't seen in a game in a long time. No explosions, no shooting, just characters talking about their feelings.

The police chases are there, but A) there's an intentionally significantly reduced police presence than a GTA (which makes sense from an environmental storytelling sense: Night City having fewer overall cops implies a certain lawlessness to the city; it's also a staple of the genre, with fewer but worse cops a Cyberpunk "tradition"), and B) yeah it did launch buggy, and was one of the earlier things corrected in patches but not early enough for a lot of people that wanted police chases.

Yea, Night City cops are incompetent, bought and/or downright criminals themselves. They don't care if you shoot someone on the street.

And if you shoot the wrong someone, cops and jail time are the smallest of your problems.

My understanding is that the whole hate around the game is the fact that it got over-hyped with everyone just raising the expectation to then finish with a suboptimal release that was worse than dog shit on a sidewalk... Everyone that stepped on it, obviously, got frustrated and reacted on it. Can't blame people for getting angry and reacting on something that was NOT what they paid for. We can blame them however for supporting this type of hyped releases by throwing money at game companies before they even give proof that their product is solid or even close to what they advertise.

I'm gonna say that if you were content playing it on PS4, your expectations probably were far below that of the average player.

I completely understand why people with high expectations were disappointed with the game.

The expectations weren't just high, they were completely bonkers.

People were seriously expecting that a console released in 2013 - almost a decade ago - could run a fully realized city with an unique AI for every person in there, with huge crowds you could get lost in.

Rockstar still did a better job on the Xbox 360 than Cyberpunk did at launch on PC IMO. There was more stuff on the screen in cyberpunk but it felt extremely inconsistent and ungrounded

I'm still occasionally amazed how Rockstar could make such an incredibly big open-world game (GTA 5) actually run on the Xbox 360. I think that was more of a miracle outlier in the industry than anything else, they were probably stretching the limits of what that small machine can do. Still, Rockstar's advantage was that they were making a GTA game with a well-tested formula, compared to what Cyberpunk was trying to do everything well and then failed because of a lack of proper direction.

The 360 had some rather insane releases towards the end of it's life, GTA 5 was just one of them.

Watch Dogs and Risen 3 were very capable open-worlders, that shouldn't run on such low-end hardware and I'm still not sure how Bioware managed to pull off Dragon Age: Inquisition or how Konami made MGSV run as well as it did.

From what I've heard, ther was some similar wizardry going on with the PS4.

Well, cd project red did said multiple times that the PS4 version had no issues, do not blame consumer for not knowing technical details about game development

It's mostly FUD driven, after CP there were worse quality releases of eg. Battlefield, GTA but they didn't gain that much media coverage and somehow Sony didn't pull them out from their store to "protect players from bad purchase decisions"

Did they pull Fallout 76?

I've completed Cyberpunk 2077 twice, and although I really like the game and would recommend it to anyone who finds it interesting, there's most definitely bugs.

I've had a quest line be incompletable because some script trigger didn't happen (I think the NPC got stuck), I've had to reload an autosave because a story mission would not progress (most likely a missed trigger again), escort NPCs have followed me for hours after completing the escort mission they were involved in, I've had cars instantly stop from 200 km/h after hitting an invisible barrier in the middle of a road, jumping over a barrier has sent me flying into space, NPCs have had objects stuck to their hands, NPC voice lines have duplicated, I've gotten stuck in a finisher animation, I've gotten stuck in a car that spawned inside an object, NPCs have walked through parked cars during missions, and a lot of random T-posing.

And these are the bugs that I remember off the top of my head, or remembered by having a cursorary look through my YouTube uploads.

Luckily, most of the bugs are funny and only visual, but it was pretty annoying that the only way I would've been able to continue that one side quest was by reloading a save and losing hours of progress.

I really wanted to like it (and I still like bits of it quite a lot) but I just thought narratively it was not very good, and the gameplay was nowhere near as thorough as (say) GTA V.

Keanu also can't act which is a shame.

Visually the game is definitely astonishing, but I could never tell what the game is actually trying to be. If they'd made a very pretty game mulling over (say) the kind of deep sci-fi you get in something like blade runner 2049, then I'd probably still be playing to this day, whereas what they actually ended up with felt a bit incidental.

It's kind of unfair, so I don't hold it too much against the game, but even though the visuals are very good, the overall world doesn't feel as real as it could do IMO. The obvious comparison is with GTA V (which is why I say it's slightly unfair because GTA V is based on LA in ~2013), which just feels so much more real to me. The radio stations are a good example, they're such heavy handed satire, but that satire lets your brain fill in the detail about Los Santos whereas in Night City I was mostly being shown things that would never happen again or being made to pick choices that would have no effect etc.

Why is the obvious comparison GTA? It's a game from an RPG studio focusing on stories and that's what CP2077 also is and does best.

Why do you keep comparing it to another genre?

>Why do you keep comparing it to another genre?

because pre-release the developers made the GTA comparison, every video game media outlet made the comparison, and every press piece regarding the game pre-release focused on the 'open-world' elements, while promising post-release multiplayer.

let's not pretend this was billed as a single-player RPG fantasy; it wasn't. It was toted as a GTA competitor in nearly every single way.

The post release narrative shift of "well it's a story-driven game from a well known story-driven 'RPG studio', it was YOUR expectations that were wrong! " was totally drawn hastily after release to try to assuage angry and disappointed fans during a rocky release.

aside : "rpg studio" is a thing now?

Because I never really got the impression I was playing an RPG ever since I made a choice but was then immediately funnelled into the same path as everyone else

This how all their RPGs (and most others) work.

You really would not want to compare it to Skyrim/Fallout either. The atmosphere ... is just not there.

It's much better than those two, by a lot in truth.

I honestly can't fathom how you could possibly make it through the entire game with hardly any bugs. When I played on my PS4 it crashed quite regularly (hourly, probably). It was only slightly better on my PS5. And bugs were everywhere. I don't see how you could play this game for 5 minutes and not at least encounter numerous visual glitches (T-poses, NPCs walking into and through walls or 5 feet in the air). Most bugs weren't game-breaking (though I ran into some of those). But they were certainly plentiful and unavoidable.

I completed it months ago on my Linux desktop. It didn't crash, no bugs, all good.

The character building in the story and the themes are really good, and I also enjoyed V and Johnny Rotten and their relationship tremendously. However, the way the game is structured and the story combined with the open-world game are atrocious.

The intense time pressure that the storyline badgers you with at every beat becomes absurdist comedy when the story missions finish and you start doing side quests. This is especially bizarre in the tone difference between the main story quests and the companion quests which have a huge influence on the story itself, but usually make little to no reference to the extreme time pressure.

Just watch this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omyoJ7onNrg