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>For anyone interested: Ignore the negative reviews.

Most of the negative reviews are not only perfectly legitimate but address structural issues in the game not fixable with quality of life patches and the adding of a bunch of new weapons and cars, one year after the release of the game, which by the way were never lacking. This game has so much cut content that some quests feel like a demo version and main characters like Adam Smasher (a primary antagonist) behave like an afterthought with barely no presence, feeling as lifeless and predictable as the rest of Night City.

The excusable tragedy of Cyberpunk it's that it miserably fails to deliver in every different aspect it touches, excelling in none of the many ambitions it had. The unexcusable part is its unplayable console release, that felt like a borderline scam.

>It has a great and challenging story

Disco Elysium or Pathologic 2 have memorable stories; Cyberpunk is a painfully mediocre experience at best, in my opinion.

I'm very grateful that the game was not longer, I loved playing through it, but I don't have the time for a +100 hour story.

I'll pay extra for a shorter and more interesting story line any day.

I completed the game before the second patch came out, I didn't really hit any bugs, maybe once or twice I had to save and reload it.

An intense and ACTUALLY INTERSTING main story of about 10 hours, with no grind or "let's waste your time with these menial tasks" in between, that is my preference.

Context: If I'm lucky, I can squeeze 1 or 2 hours in maybe 3 or 4 evenings per week, at the evening when I'm maxmially tired from the demands of real life, and at that point, I have very little tolerance for a game trying to waste my precious time.

The Witcher 3 took me 150 hours with all the DLC, I enjoyed every minute of it and didn't want it to end. I don't understand "I don't have time for a 100 hour story", if you enjoy the game why do you want it to be short?

Because even if it was actually 150 hours of densely packed, highly entertaining, engaging story, there's no version of the universe where I'd be able to keep all that in my head when it's chopped up into about 100 short evening sessions. Sure, if I had all the time in the world, sure, but even if people enjoy grinding, nobody is going to convince me that these games provide 150 hours of intense, solid entertainment, they "merely" take 150 hours to get through. I've gone through long games back when I had the life to waste, and of course I enjoyed that, but I'm under no illusion that there was generally more "work" in them.

Witcher 3 has a robust quest system, an in game encyclopedia, and a lot of great use of narrative and dialog options to remind the player where they are in the trilogy of games storywise.

It's something than can be improved with practice. I can now read a few dozen books at a time and have no trouble keeping them straight, and I'm sure I've benefitted from that in other ways in my day to day life. Remember that humans relied on oral tradition for hundreds of thousands of years. Give yourself some credit!

Thing is, I also enjoy the satisfaction of having been through a story, having the feeling that that I know the story well, that I've been there and enjoyed myself and seen the end.

I don't get that when I spread it out too thin. I enjoy movies and tv shows for different reasons, and often, for story-based games (as opposed to multiplayer games and pure-skill games) I enjoy the "movie" version more, "short" sweet, dense and intense.

For the other types, I play OSU! and whatever the popular FPS is at the moment it's Apex Legends, but those I play for different reasons than games with a good story.

That strikes me as a preposterously large desired game time

It's actually closer to 22 hours if you only play through the main story. I also wish that the main storyline of the game was longer.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=2127

For comparison, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is currently estimated to take about 51 hours if you only focus on the main story. https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=10270

Is it? If you play 3-4 hours per day, you'll finish the game in less than a month, and the open world is quite poor, so you'll have little to do in between.

Game devs: We’re sorry our game only provided an entire months’ entertainment of daily 3-4 hour play sessions, we’ll try harder next time

I don't understand this world where you're playing a game for 3-4 hours, every day, for a month, and come out of it feeling like that wasn't enough.

What sort of ROI do you expect from your entertainment? Videogames right now are absolutely one of the cheapest $/entertainment-hour markets in the world right now. Assuming you paid a full $70 at launch, "only" getting 60 hours of gameplay out of that is still not much more than $1/entertainment-hour! You aren't going to find many better deals for your entertainment time.

GTA is anything but forgettable. The missions may often be linear but they're always entertaining, not least because of the characters and dialogue.

>For anyone interested: Ignore the negative reviews.

As I replied elsewhere, it is strange to see another echo chamber in action. The sales number seems to be doing fine. And reviews were extremely polarised.

I think the negative reviews are warranted for gamers but not for software developers. The game is complex. It introduces tons of new stuff (like hacking, cyberware gear, scanning, brain dances, etc...) that makes it a programming challenge.

The team did definitively over-extend themselves and failed to deliver a perfect? product but I don't see why this is being shunned here. They pushed the limits where it comes to Open World games and GTA has to up their game a LOT in the next release.

> It introduces tons of new stuff (like hacking, cyberware gear, scanning, brain dances, etc...) that makes it a programming challenge.

I'm sorry, but as a software dev with some hobby experience in game development, I disagree with this.

* hacking: tons of other games have a hacking component, either as a hack this computer, or break this lock, or make an enemy turret be friendly, or control this enemy. Fallout has hacking, Batman Arkham series has hacking (and enemy control), PoE has enemy take over skills etc

* cyberware gear: there is no difference between a "cyber deck" and a "helmet of might". Also, I think Deus-Ex has cyberware gear...

* scanning: Arkham games have a beautiful implementation of the concept. Horizon Zero Dawn has scanning.

* brain dances: this is simply playing a pre "recorded" 3d scene with some elements removed based on the "mode" selected. This is not a very hard thing to do, from a software development perspective, but requires lots of content. And guess what, there are like 4 brain dances in the game: the tutorial, the find the chip mission, the find the voodoo lady mission and the side mission with the cow dude.

And this is a recurring thing with Cyberpunk 2077, lack of content. I wish they'd spent less on getting Keanu Reaves to "star" and more on adding more clothing options or side missions, or give the beggars more lines. It would have been really cool to stay a while and listen to a beggar about that time their tank got blown up and they had to trek back from behind enemy lines...

Here is the thing, you can both like the game and critique the technical aspects.

Those may be "common" features across a number of games, but no one is sharing code in games. The hobby experience is shifting with respect to how broad the Unity marketplace is starting to be in pluggable modules, but AAA games is still mostly the land of massive NIH and almost every game is still much more a bespoke artisanal thing with very little reused under the hood from game to game than any game player imagines.

This seems especially so in CDPR's case: they aren't using Unreal or any other off-the-shelf engine, they developed their own engine bespoke for The Witcher. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first game to use that engine for something that wasn't The Witcher series. A lot of their technical hurdles seem almost entirely related: it doesn't seem like it should be a huge surprise that a game engine originally built for a setting where the fastest traveling vehicle is a horse starts to fall down with performance problems when you introduce cars and sky cars and planes.

(Some small credit where credit is due: Rockstar at least started with GTA and then moved to RDR. Cars to horses seems to make more sense as a transition for a game engine than the other way around.)

Absolutely there are probably technical things CDPR could have done to avoid some of the problems they've had, but it was way more of a "programming challenge" than "why didn't they just copy and paste the hacking component from Fallout [Bethesda/Microsoft] and scanning from Arkham Asylum [Rocksteady/Warner Brothers] and call it a day?" (They couldn't, there's no way to access those components from other companies. There's no "Unity store" for that sort of stuff. There's not even a "Unity" here: all three of those franchises have extremely different bespoke game engines that never leave the doors of their development companies or publishers.)

Sorta obvious they knew what the game was and that's exactly why they backed up the dump truck of money on Keanu

Watchdogs already did all those ideas brilliantly. Cyberpunk took most of those ideas and gave them a half-assed clunky implementation that should have been embarrassing for them in comparison. Every time Cyberpunk introduced a new concept I got so excited, thinking about all the potential for fun and how they might develop the ideas as the game progressed. And then there was no follow through.

It's a wonderful world/backdrop/setting. I like the story. There's 50x as much cutscenes and consequence-free dialog choices as there needs to be. I occasionally had fun with the missions. But overall it was a big basket of good ideas that they dropped on the floor.

Haven't played CP so I can't comment on this specific aspect, but actions like hacking, taking over cameras, robots, or augmenting your character were already present in earlier tiles. Specifically, Deus Ex can be praised here. The hacking mini games were great, while augmentations opened many new ways to complete the missions, dramatically changing the gameplay.

Is there a list of promises, bugs, and fixes?

I recall that No Man's Sky had a community made list that showed the progress in its ambitions, and led to people being amazed at the turn around.