Arachnarok_Rider: I would say that while I'm having fun with the game, I'm also getting increasingly frustrated with just how much CDPR underdelivered on pretty much everything.
The game is currently "fun" sci-fi arcade action. It is Borderlands, except without all the grief of increasingly spongy enemies and weapons that you have to replace every 30 minutes. And Night City is very nice.
But...
1) Night City is not "alive". There is a metric ton of randomly spawned NPCs walking around that are purely eye candy, but none of them have any significance. They do not live anywhere, they serve no function, they have no real role other than being decoration. You can kill a thousand of them and it makes no difference, the game just respawns new filler people.
2) The police is a sick joke. Probably the most laughably undercooked implementation of police in a triple-A game since the term was invented.
3) Gangs are just groupings of people with a particular fashion sense. Gang affiliation is currently just cosmetic. There is no consequence whatsoever for declaring total war against any and all gang members. The gang will not come after you, they will not hold a grudge next time they see you, they will neither remember nor even acknowledge that you have massacred them for loot and experience.
4) Most choices don't really matter. You end the same place regardless. You can sneak through a mission or shoot the hell out of it, and maybe your mission bonus is impacted, but mission accomplished is mission accomplished and nobody remembers how you did it anyway. Nobody cares.
5) For all the horsepoo CDPR spewed about "style" and "fashion" in the game, it really does not matter one bit. Nobody cares and players can't really concern themselves with it either.
6) The nudity toggle is a lie. You cannot switch nudity on. You can cut people's heads off but you must take a shower with your underwear on, and you cannot stick it to conservative norms by running around naked, because that would be too much punk.
7) Gun customization is simply not there. You can throw in predefined mods as well as maybe a scope and a silencer, but you don't get a say in color schemes and you can't really tweak your gun. And given how much we're using guns, this is really a bummer.
8) Missions are not complex. Sure, that one prologue mission with the bot had a fair bit of depth, but almost everything else is either "go here, shoot there, all done", or it contains very sensitive script triggers that are at risk of breaking. Some of the cyber-psycho missions go fubar if you approach from weird angles or save and reload at various points, and the drunk target shooting party crashing thing at the 6th street gathering appears to be very touch and go.
9) Item depth is depressing. I'm only level 20 so far (but high 30's in street cred) and I find so many of the same damn guns all the time, but they're all identical and most are rubbish. And it really is kind of sad to have been through probably hundreds of exactly the same gun with zero cool tweaks or conversions on them.
10) The game doesn't strictly speaking prevent you from role-playing, but it sure doesn't make it easy either. There's really nothing in the game that helps you anchor yourself to a particular personality, and a lot of missions will really boil down to either being a high level sneaky hacker who can be bothered slowly crawling through the obstacles or alternatively full on hardcore murder-hobo.
11) There's a funny mission where you pick up a painting that was out in space. It lands in the desert and you then have to discuss the ownership details with a bunch of Militech goons. Spoiler: They don't care if you helped that corpo girl earlier. They don't know who she is. They see you, they'll murder you.
12) You don't hack with monowire. You don't open doors or rip out turrets with gorilla arms. Having gorilla arms does not offer protection or add to melee damage, as one might have expected. They are purely for boxing, essentially a blunt alternative to mantis blades.
13) Crafting kind of sucks. If you can get enough materials then it becomes very strong but getting that much materials takes crazy grinding or cheese.
All in all, this just isn't the game they were talking about before release. So much stuff was cut. I actually didn't think they could do that without creating problems but they managed to more or less gut every single mechanic with complexity to it. Every. Single. One. And I am not convinced that they'll go through the efforts of adding them back in.
I have to agree, what CDPR actually promised vs what they delivered is very different. The people who are praising the game definately didn't want an RPG but just an on the rails looter-shooter. I still say this is the side-effect of trying to mix a first person shooter with a deep and engaging RPG... the majority of people who enjoy first person shooters don't care about the story or the immersion they just want to go pew pew.... so what you end up with is not an RPG but a looter-shooter.