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I’m loving the game so far (on a PC with a 3080), but it is certainly wide instead of deep. It feels really really shallow. There is a lot of content but very little feels meaningful. Outside of the missions with the girlfriend there is very little relationship building. Even this come short compared to most other rpg’s. I have also had a few insane bugs, but nothing came breaking. For example for a while my character was standing naked in his bike, and in another instance a lady was standing like the Rio Christ statue for a whole mission.

I don’t really mind the examples in the Twitter thread, but I do mind that you really cannot interact with the world in any meaningful way.

Sounds like the eternal issue of open world games though. Olympic size wading pools is how I like to describe them. Many things to do, but with minimal depth and little, if any, impact on the game world.

None other than skyrim is one of the best examples of this.

Sure, but cyberpunk is based on a pen and paper RPG so I really hoped it had a little more.

But yeah your description is pretty good.

For me it was great on the beginning, the mood and the graphics are pretty good. Some missions are great as well. But now I’m not really sure if I will even finish it. It doesn’t really feel meaningful.

Also even though there are some explicit sex scenes (but so few I’m not sure why they are there), it is really not edgy at all. It’s like a corporation designed the game which is everything cyberpunk is not supposed to be.

There are a ton of great ideas in there, but then someone realized it would take too long so they half assed everything.

> There are a ton of great ideas in there, but then someone realized it would take too long so they half assed everything.

Totally agree. Take for example character backgrounds. They are meaningless. You have a custom 5 min introduction for that background and then you are playing the same game as everybody with the addition of just a few dialogs.

They could have just focused on one background and make the side quests more relevant to that background.

If you role-play your character there is zero room for toying around with side missions once the story kicks in. cp77 simply isn't a do whatever you like game, it's a story game with a backdrop of a somewhat interactive surrounding. Compared to earlier cityscape story backdrops like e.g. in Deus Ex series games or the endless iterations of Assassins Creeds the backdrop is far more interactive and even a little gamified. But it shouldn't be considered the game, it's a backdrop.

Thats why I actually like that Cyberpunk 2077 seems to have a fairly focused mission structure. (I haven't played very far, mind you). It always bothered me in e.g. Bethesda's games that I was supposed to be on some all-important world-saving quest, but it's no problem if I want to just spelunk in ancient dwarves ruins for a few months instead.

> but it's no problem if I want to just spelunk in ancient dwarves ruins for a few months instead

And that's exactly why I loved it haha, but I do understand the grievance with it

Never bothered me in Skyrim though, nobody has mobile phones there.

Yes, playing it as anything but a rails game seems to be wildly out of character once the story has progressed beyond the initial handshake. The open world backdrop makes the railed story far more immersive than an actual rails tunnel that you cannot leave could ever be, but only if you mostly ignore it. And the main story track is pulling much stronger than in something like Skyrim.

With this game it's probably a generational thing on more than one level: not only do most people tend to grow out of side quest competitionism at some point, I suspect that older parts of the audience are also drawn into this particular main story stronger than their younger peers. It's just so perfectly 1990ies vibe that you almost forget that people did not in fact have mind machine interfaces and fancy prosthetic limbs when they sent their first email on AOL. The game represents exactly how people born around 1977 remember the movies of their youth (entirely unlike how you'd perceive them if you'd see them today).

Not sure of that. The most critically acclaimed games e.g. RDR2, Horizon Zero Dawn etc. have very deep and intriguing stories while maintaining the world as “open” as possible. Even the Witcher is another example. Cyberpunk sounds like a case of massive overhyping and under delivering. Some fanboys here and there are unwilling to face the reality, but most reviews I’ve read seem to be sober and corroborate the above point.

I disagree. Maybe don't skip the dialogues :) I have quite a contrary impression - the game is very deep and their world is not so wide as it could be.

Interestingly, that despawning does not happen on PC.

This was on PC.

Its buggy and some parts seem to be missing, like can cops/enemies even track you at all? But at same time it gives more than a well built game would, yesterday I tried to make easy money by running over max-tac cops and taking their lvl 50 stuff. I cant kill them with guns, but hitting them with car seems to do the job. In normal game, high level enemies would kill you instantly, but in cyberpunk, you can just take their stuff, run couple blocks and everybody forgets that you just killed 2 cops, then go back and do it again.

That is a great example of an actual bug, that ALL players saw, and many didn't notice at all.

The police seemly doesn't have an AI, people actually believed they didn't.

But a player happened to see a police car with cops inside (extremely rare to see that), and saved his game near, and ran several tests.

He found out if you piss off the cops, using a car (on foot they just exit the car and never climb back on), and then you hit their car with yours (shooting them doesn't work, they just go away following a pre-programmed path), they start chasing your GTA-style.

So this means they DID code the cop cars to chase the player car, but a sequence of bugs make the only way to see this content to be go out of your way to do it (you need to see cops in a car spontaneously while you are inside a car too, then run over a pedrestrian, then hit the cop car with your car).

I really don't mind that.

Really npc's are stupid in skyrim, gta, cyberpunk whatever. And it doesn't matter. When you look at Watch Dogs, its getting very repettetive anyway; You look at a few and discover that you actually don't care about it anyway.

I play cyberpunk right now for the story they build and they build, so far, a very good story.

They can keep the npcs as they are honestly; Finetune perhaps but meh

You are right that NPCs are generally stupid across the board. However, in CP2077 they are outright broken. If you look at an NPC, turn 180 degrees and then look back, the NPC is either gone or replaced with another NPC entirely. There are stuff like that, not related to "stupidity", that breaks the immersion for me.

PS. I'm also enjoying the game a lot, but soft locks and brokenness is starting to take it's toll.

GTA 5 does that too, but it may be observed more often when you’re low on RAM/VRAM. When I played GTA 4 on a microwave, it spawned the same car over and over until you get far enough from a current location. Not saying that it is okay for CP2077 in 2020, but this behavior is not unique. Maybe they overestimated where hardware industry will be in 2020Q4.

I played a lot of GTAV, and I never noticed it. Perhaps it preserved actors within a certain radius of the player? Or maybe the third person view made it less apparent. To dynamically spawn/despawn actors is a necessity I suppose, but I've never seen it handled so poorly and sloppy as in CP2077.

GTA generally is pretty good about keeping things close to you around, e.g. looking backwards won't usually remove traffic in front of you. The most obvious case are NPCs that aren't "relevant" anymore, e.g. people that have places around the city that depend on time of day. If their "active" time ends, they'll start wandering off from their location. If you follow one, you can for a long time, but if you then even look away for a split second they'll be removed, presumably because the game tracks them as something it wants to unload after their useful time has ended, but won't do it while you look.

In earlier GTAs like San Andreas there is an explicit difference between "traffic in the distance" and "traffic close by" - the former will be removed if out of sight, doesn't have full-fidelity 3D models, apparently doesn't have physics applied to them, ... Once they get close enough, they get more complete and sticky. (GTA V quite possibly does the same, I just know less about the details there and its a lot less obvious)

Yeah, I think GTA has been doing a good job at handling these things gracefully.

Regarding your second point, I'm not sure if you've seen how it's handled in CP? Basically all roads in the distance have a string of car/headlight sprites (yes, 2D) moving on them. Makes the world look amazingly populated and alive.

However the density of the sprite cars is much higher than the actual cars (depending on your settings). So when driving on a long road you always seem to be chasing a large group of cars that you can never reach. There seems to be no connection between actual cars spawning in and the sprite based crowd illusion.

And if you use a scope with good zoom to observe the sprite cars, it looks very funny. Basically you have very obvious Doom faux-3D sprites in an otherwise stunning environment.

Both GTA V and Red Dead 2 have pretty broken and uninteresting NPCs as well unless you start causing havoc in immersion breaking and unrealistic ways. I think the fact that in Cyberpunk 2077 you can't have fun just randomly blowing up shit and causing havoc is a good thing. It is very unsatisfactory to randomly kill people or run them over, because there is nothing interesting about it. The art direction and ambiance works very well as a "movie set" but not so much as a sandbox.

Still doesn't matter to me and has not had any real influence on me whatsoever. I'm not doing anything with them. They are there for the feeling not for relevance.

100% agree. I think the people that harp on about this are expecting the game to be something it's just not. Why not focus on the aspects of it that are good, instead - like, literally anything else? Visuals? Story? Tactics? Ambience? Different character builds? The game gives you plenty of freedom to decide how you want to experience it. It seems like a lot of people just want to focus on the uninteresting/minor parts for some reason.

People have focused on the poor story and gameplay too.

That said, why do we have to remain purely positive for an expensive AAA game that promised so much and sold at a high price tag? Why should they be excused?

https://nitter.net/jumpovertheage/status/1338929166301990914

for those of us that just heard about nitter in some other thread here today.

Reading the Twitter thread I wonder if people just have unrealistic expectations.

Self driving cars are a billion dollar industry, and yet you expect a game dev studio to come up with a realistic AI for drivers?

It's a game. People know that it's not real. Sure, it's fun to discover the tricks that the devs had to pull off to make it work. But man, don't blame a game dev studio that they haven't come up with an algorithm for self driving cars.

Self diving cars are not comparable to a driver AI. The AI exists within a world where it can have full knowledge of everything, and will have significantly less edge cases to worry about. Many racing and open world games do a great job at this, so it's not that it can't be done.

edit: Also hitting a pedestrian isn't a huge deal in a videogame.

FWIW, I got hit by cars a lot in my cyberpunk playthrough. Fits the dystopian narrative I guess, but even in a dystopia people worry about scratching their car or an insurance nightmare so not too realistic experience.

Other than the game is very enjoyable on a PC, with some really enjoyable NPC action, interesting side quests and a great main story line. Also a great value compared to buying a movie or going to the cinema for a similar price - so far sunk 50h into the game.

I don't mean to be a jerk, but I don't think you know what you are talking about here. Driver AI in a video game isn't nearly as complex as self driving cars in the real world. Plenty of games have been able to create a more realistic driver AI.

For example take a look at this video[1], specifically the part in which the user shoots at AI driven cars. The AI in GTA 5 responds in a much more realistic fashion. This has a huge impact on immersion and creating a lifelike world. GTA 5 came out 7 years ago. There is no technical reason for Cyberpunk's AI being this bad. CDPR simply didn't want to invest the time in making it better.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9VMTk13wfo&t=390

This video really hurts to watch. It looks so dead even compared to The Witcher 3

You're right, I had no idea how realistic drivers behave in newer games. Would be interesting to see what tricks GTA pulls off to hide the limits of their AI. Obviously they do a better job.

(Sidenote: When the guy started beating up pedestrians I just couldn't continue watching that video. Maybe I'm getting old.)

Seems like hacks to make the game run better on consoles. PC def doesn't disappear stuff you aren't looking at.