dizzymonkey: So you mean then Cyberpunk is just like Witcher 3 or the ES games?
It's not like there weren't merchants and background NPCs in those other games that you were not intended to interact with and were instead just background color to make the environment fleshed out. For every 100 "merchants" in Witcher 3 you could maybe interact with 1 of them. Hell, same was true in the ES or FO games where in a major city you had tons of random NPCs who either A) didn't do anything other than stand around or B) who was supposedly had some role that for some reason you couldn't interact with them in any real fashion.
It's like folks either didn't play or forgot how these games worked. Go on a murder rampage in some of these other games - kill 100 random NPCs and guess what? They just respawn with other random filler NPCs. Kill your horse (or do something that should kill your horse) and poof - you magically get the same one back (magically teleporting horse BTW).
"And it's like that with everything. Every. Freaking. Thing. Nothing makes sense. Nothing even pretends to make sense." - What does that mean? Any examples?
I keep hearing people gush and soak their underwear about W3 but then somehow complain about the same mechanics in Cyberpunk.
I suspect that you are trying to troll me. For some reason, even though I did not mention Witcher 3 at all, you keep wanting to force that into the conversation. I do not know why, as it has zero relevance to anything I said.
But keep in mind that this game was hyped as a deep RPG. A game where choice matters and where you could literally just follow NPCs around. Keep in mind that at no point did they come out and announce that actually all those plans were scrapped and now it would only be a Borderlands-clone set in the Cyberpunk 2020 universe.
This has implications. If that is the type of game people were promised then people will obviously evaluate it against such lofty goals. If CDPR had merely promised a hare-brained looter-shooter with great graphics then the reception would obviously have been much better.
You ask why the game world doesn't make sense? You have unique vehicles that are described as unique in the game but which are somehow trivially replaced in minutes. The world is described as dark and dystopian and full of cynical sharks that will eat you the moment you let your guard down and yet V is naive and trusting beyond belief, even by ordinary real world standards. You have "legendary" and "iconic" items and wow, that is so amazing, except random street junk with a few more item levels is actually a lot more effective.
Healing hypos can bring anyone back from practically dead, something we even see in the story, but you can't tell Jackie to have a huff on one your your dozen hypos, can't even give him one post-mission or in the elevator. You have to jump off the penthouse to escape because fighting through security is not an option, but then right after the jump, you suddenly can fight your way through security after all.
And of course there's the hilarious bit about how nanites can convert any brain to a Johnny-brain, even a brain turned to mush by a bullet, but they cannot convert a Johnny-brain to a V-brain. And speaking of brains, one very big problem with having this much tech wired into your brain is the risk of catching a virus - how very fortunate that you only do that a single time in the entire game and then never ever have to worry about your anti-viral measures ever again.
And then there's the gangs in general. The game tries to depict the various gangs as actually being dangerous, and there are a number of quest suggesting that one does not screw around with gangs without consequence. However, V can in fact screw around with gangs entirely without consequence. V can literally milk the everlasting fuck out of infinite gang spawns. The game also has a number of quests about cyberpsychos, who are pretty much without fail people who killed maybe a few dozen people or less, but now consider how many times V ends up murdering people in those numbers without anyone suggesting V is a cyberpsycho?
And we can go on. There are quite a lot of computers with quite a lot of files and messages and network controls and pretty much all of them can access "the net", but for some reason you can't buy anything online? Yeah, I know, hacking is a proble, but if hacking is such a problem then why do we find all these computers with important stuff that are evidently connected to "the net"? And how come V can have an automatic face scan upload built into their eyes but still have to rely on a handheld phone, and a regular old computer for emails?
Having those fancy gorilla arm implants makes you stronger, supposedly, except they literally don't do anything. And here's a funny one: Subdermal armor is actually a thing in Cyberpunk, so unarmoured skin can literally be extremely resistant to little peashooter bullets. Guess what you get shot with in the story? Some stupid peashooter bullet. And we know this for a fact, because we can recover that god-awful pistol we got shot with.
Then there's the mature stuff. CDPR had their nuts caught in a vice, I suspect, and couldn't do it any other way if they wanted Sony and MS to let their games onto their consoles, but it is still all kinds of unconvincing. I completely undermines that whole "city of sin" vibe when nothing ever gets more risque than what fits into a PG13 rating. Go to a random high school party at 3 in the morning, you'll see way more suggestive displays than probably anywhere in Night City.
Also, has it ever struck you how extremely tame enemy netrunners and quickhackers are? I'm having a go with a hacker, just to try it out, and system reset really does a number on things. Reset optics is the same. Restrict movement is the same. Kind of unbelievably fortunate that nobody ever uses these things on V, isn't it?
And this is why the game world doesn't make sense. Why it doesn't even feel like CDPR tried to make the game world make sense. The list here is not exhaustive and we could make it longer, if we really wanted to, but what's the point? The game world is as convincing and deep and alive as that of a Borderworlds game, nothing more, nothing less. It's a comic book world, an obvious painted flat surface on a rock where you're not supposed to actually expect any rhyme or reason and where you're absolutely not meant to look below the surface. Just accept whatever cartoonery nonsense is presented at face value.
Lastly, regarding NPCs, you are making one giant flawed argument when comparing permanent NPCs in, say, Skyrim or Morrowind or Fallout, with the randomly spawned pseudo-people we get in this game. It is a stretch to refer to those as even "NPCs", because they are not really characters in the first place. They are just clutter that looks like people. Kill one, it will despawn in due time and be replaced with another. This is different from NPCs in Bethesda games. Unnamed enemies would respawn, but Skyrim settlements could actually depotulate rather dramatically due to vampires and dragons. Morrowind would happily let you kill named NPCs, ending your quest lines and whatnot.
Also, do note that games 20 years ago managed to figure out schedules for NPCs to make them seem more alive. Gothic 2 had it. Then it was implemented in Oblivion (IIRC), Skyrim, even the Fallouts. Characters would not just be anchored to the same spot, 24/7. How about CP77 permanent NPCs, are you seeing them move about much?