There seem to be two factions: Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed. But if you're there for the story and Cyberpunk look & feel, you'll have a good time.
Of course, this excludes the console issues. Console players got shafted. CD Project might be able to fix that to some degree, but the reputational damage is done.
GTA is GTA because Rockstar perfected the formula and the engine over several iterations of the game. I'm sure every GTA is a mountain of work to create, but its a considerably smaller mountain than starting from scratch.
But putting GTA aside, I don't think CDPR ever promised to create a Cyberpunk-GTA clone.
There's a lot of small bugs. It doesn't run particularly well, but I'll say it again - the core game is fun and story well written. I'm taking a break, but I look forward to revisiting after the first few big patches.
Edit: One thing that's always worked for me is to amortize the cost of purchase by time played. If I get only six hours of Cyberpunk 2077 played at $60. That's 10/hr for entertainment... which is better than a lot of stuff.
I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.
Gamers are so cranky.
Most expected the latest and greatest, what they got was not that. Every hype/drop cycle is the same, but this cycle is filled with more valid complaints than normal, depressingly.
People felt burnt on Oblivion in 2013 because it was boring green forests and unappealing face design. That game pretty much worked for hundreds of hours of content. Cyberpunk can't even get the basic mechanics right.
I haven't played it since launch, it made for a good internet historian video!
I agree. I played it a few hours on launch at a friend's place and it was completely underwhelming.
I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.
The amount of time we have is finite, attaching a dollars per hour figure to it is a hilariously bad metric to judge how much value entertainment has. People don't play X's and O's all day because it's great value.
I paid $250 for a six person table with dinner at the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra while they played all the best pieces of John Williams' music from his many film scores. Only a two hour concert, but the Jurassic Park theme made me tear up, and I was only 10 feet from the orchestra.
I paid $300 for two Conductor's Box seats at the MSO for myself and a girl I was dating to see the Harry Potter in Concert series, where you watch a Harry Potter movie while the orchestra plays all the music from the film live. For me, it was hit or miss, since I was too old to really get into Harry Potter, but the lady I was seeing was 15 years younger than me, so it really affected her, which of course really benefited me.
Both cases, money well spent.
I don't think this is fair at all. From the earliest days of their marketing, CDPR was promising that Cyberpunk2077 would have "unprecedented" levels of customization, open world interaction, and next-level AIs. It may have been foolish for people to believe that would come true, but CDPR definitely did promise this, and I think it's perfectly understandable that many people feel that they were straight up lied to.
It's a classic case where CDPR just overhyped itself too much. If you ignore the ridiculous amount of bugs, it is a decent game, but it definitely is not at all the "unprecedented" game that CDPR hyped it up to be.
It has some open world jank, which is inconvenient but pretty much part of the genre even for experienced behemoths like Rockstar, but so far I haven't seen any wide-spread reports of actually game-breaking stuff.
When talking about "ridiculous amounts of bugs", in an open-world game, much worse offenders come to mind that have been doing so for literally decades and are somehow still held in somewhat high regard regardless of that, like a Bethesda.
See what I did there? Compare GTA and W3? Because to me, they are similar. I mean, you can't kill random people in W3, but the "go where you want and collect and build" seems the same.
If you're telling me 2077 is not open world, I'll be disappointed.
I personally don't expect a GTA like game, but I would expect an AI/police mechanism at least as good as gta3 (2001), and it's clearly not the case which is ridiculous.
Having 2020 graphics/interactions coupled with early 2000s AI breaks the immersion so bad