or just play smaller games nobody forces you to play this one:D

Not quite. Rather that some games can be broken down into essential, playable and complete. So it downloads the essential first, then you can play, and while you play it continues to download the rest. So it is not streaming, but dowloading while playing. For the most part it works fine, but you can hit spots which has not been dowloaded yet while playing, so the game freezes and waits until it has fetched what is needed for that zone.

I'm having flashbacks of multiload games.

If it were done, I'd rather see it based around compartmentalisation of UHD textures and audio rather than areas / characters in the game. Everyone is going to end up downloading all "areas" of a game if they want to finish it / don't want it to freeze up post-intro in an open world game, but given that something like 70% of the market own a $300 GPU or less combined with relatively poor performance, only a handful of people are going to be attempting to run this at Ultra preset on 1440p-4k screens (and almost no-one speaks / wants to switch between all 11 spoken languages during gameplay), so no reason why "base 1080p / English language" can't be installed as a default to keep size low, and then offer UHD textures / offer languages to overwrite those defaults in a patch (easily done for both Galaxy / offline installers, hence why the language drop-down menu for offline installers is used by other games in the first place...) Right now it's looking silly to download 103GB of compressed offline installers to install a "70GB" uncompressed game (who knew "inverse compression" would become a thing), and GOG are helping neither gamers nor themselves (server load / bandwidth) through lack of common sense there.

As for Wi-Fi interruptions, using a download manager could help with resume. And if running Ethernet cable isn't an option, "Powerline" adaptors (Ethernet over your home's electrical cables) has solved Wi-Fi dropouts for many people in similar situations as long as your router / PC are on the same ring.

The large downloads would annoy me. We have download caps, even if my speeds would get it done after a few hours. But the thing is, I don't have hours to play every day. So if I sit down and have tens of gigs to download, I'm playing something else.

I recall battlefront 2 being like that. I owned it for a few weeks before I could play more than once or twice because each time I got on, it redownload the whole game as a patch. So I uninstalled it. Not worth going over my data cap and not being able to play.

So Stadia or XBOX Game Pass Ultra for PC due to go live sometime during the first half 2021 would be an option. In the latter case he could also take advantage of XBOX game store since the games can be played on PC anyway. Speed may still be an issue. I don't know what the minimum speed recommendation for using game streaming services really is and where it actually starts to allow to play without running into UL/DL issues. If it is in any way comparable to watching videos Online where there's really no need to go beyond, say, 1~2MBit for HD and at least 8~16 for 4k, maybe 1.5 is enough.

Also since you mention hardware you are right. Not many own the latest hardware so performance might be an issue. Ultra settings aren't within reach for many which I guess it's the least concern players currently have to face based on topics both here and on Steam. There is a huge but in this case, though. It isn't only PC but also consoles suffering from the very same performance issues. PS4/XBOX One. PS5 does look a little better but they only got a performance mode with 60fps framerate but no graphics options. So while it may perform somewhat better, there's bugs, and it doesn't look good because it's backward compatible and clearly made first and foremost for last gen consoles. XBOX X got two modes performance and graphics or what the second one is called. PS4 is slightly worse than PS4 PRO in performance but looks even worse than what some may experience on PC when forced to play at low settings.

Hardware on PC when it is very old you should expect not being able to play at ultra. Taking at face value some even with RTX3080 yet still having poor performance, this is clearly an issue that is caused by CDPR badly optimizing the game. I have yet to see a professional preview video that shows any performance issues. Probably they used specific hardware config guaranteed to run the game without any issue.

Leaning way out of the window here but there could be another reason why review versions ran so much better than final release. Press got pre-patch version so maybe that may not have had any performance issue and the day-one patch is the culprit for many issues. Less likely that press got a special version that's guaranteed to run perfectly as maybe CDPR suspects that they play for a certain amount of hours during which time it's unlikely to run into many issues. It isn't new that press gets invited and has to play a game on company PCs or certain terms and conditions where it's forbidden to mention massive performance issues. There's been lots of cases of this happening in the past.

The way I see it CDPR got lots of work ahead and customers can't be blamed that a game runs poorly as it isn't always just very old hardware but also developers not even trying to optimize their game in the first place. Thinking that if anyone wants to play it, and the game is brand new, they should shell out money to get new hardware if it doesn't run on their system. Whatever the case some things will eventually be fixed and others never will be.

That's why friends don't let friends stay in the US :(

If a repacker on some torrent site can do it then developers can surely do it. Downloading xxGB extra just for languages/localizations f.ex. is just mindbogglingly stupidly done. Textures can also be done this way like some mods do.

Many people have, as previously mentioned, caps and/or low bandwidth, and with these huge games it is just as annoying to download/install huge amounts of data you really don't need.

F.ex CyberPunk 2077 through Galaxy is only 60GB installed (about 59GB download), compared to the offline files at a whopping 104GB(!) download... Same thing also apply to demos, which is just a small part of the game anyway, but most developers are just too lazy to package it so that it actually becomes user friendly!

Well dont lump us all in that, New York upstate has better internet than Jersy City lol. Mine is 150 up and down with no cap, and I live in the middle of no where. I have to drove 20 miles to get to the nearest grocery store. They all do up to 1000 down 1000 up, but they want to much for that like 500 a month. Also there is 1000 down 40 up spectrum with no cap. Then you got the satlite internet with no caps anymore.

How much do you pay for that?

My pet hate are launchers that pause the download while you're playing another game. Especially if they don't have the option to override this!

Yea, around here your average uncapped max speed line is somewhere in the 10-40 eur range. And if the line sux or you're rural or just want want more bandwidth & redundancy, uncapped 300 Mbit LTE is around 20-25 eur (though you can get cheaper offers) and uncapped 1000 Mbit 5G is 40-50 eur.

I think the 100 Mbit wired connection to my apartment was around 15 eur / month but I'm using LTE because it's faster, at around 20 eur / month.

That is way cheaper, and yeah there is 0 uncapped cell phone, i see ypur point now haha.

Just to see whether we are on the same page here. I wasn't talking about streaming to twitch or youtube. I was talking about game streaming services. You are absolutely right that I don't know numbers and actual speeds required to use game streaming services. I do walkthroughs on youtube got an 150/20 MBit connection and this is only so it doesn't take years to upload the videos.

Streaming to my PC plus television plus downloading plus reading and browsing the internet at the same time, even 20MBit were more than enough to not even notice any slowdown. HD streams when I had 16MBit it was enough. Those are about the only numbers I can give from personal experience.

Please understand that I'm thankful for you having taken your time to deliver some actual numbers people reading this can relate to! I learned something from it so I would have a better estimation as to what's needed. I always appreciate that!

You are correct that sometimes it is on the PC owner most often it is the developer and a bad engine choice leading to all sorts of performance problems. UE is famous for it, Unity got its fair share. Sometimes its a combination of all of it and that's just bad luck and no one really is to blame. In case of Cyberpunk the story is different in that it was released on consoles way older than most people's PC's plus new consoles which in one way or other you would expect are able to deliver superior graphics and performance and neither is true in this case. Based on reviews for each individual console where both PS4 and XBOX One are the worst in terms of graphics and performance.

To make clear the point is you can have millions of combinations of hardware on a PC where console hardware is well known and games should be optimized in a way to make the most of their hardware in terms of graphics and sound and of course performance. It is comparable in a way to the situation between someone with GTX1080 and RTX2080 and someone who owns a 1070Ti or 1060Ti. The only difference is that on PC you should expect not to be able to play them on Ultra but at least at lower settings in a range that's between ~30 and 60fps. In case of Cyberpunk this is exactly what is happening when comparing PS4/Pro and PS5 where the latter got better performance without offering better graphics in any way.

So my conclusion is that it isn't PC owners at fault, which of course we both can't know without anymore detail given, and certainly not console owner's fault, that there is poor performance on both platforms. Though again I strongly agree that it could be an OS thing, could be hardware, drivers, services, or any combination on PC leading to additional performance or other issues that can't be blamed on developers.

Summarily saying let's just see what the next patch will do on all platforms and see whether it has been due to no optimization CDPR or certain software or OS MS or it's some user issue that may may not be fixable. That only time will tell.

Add: Just to make clear game streaming services like GeForce Now, Stadia and Playstation Now. XBOX is upcoming. Which is as I though almost exactly what Geralt has had in mind. The only thing I had to guesstimate were speeds which after a short crosscheck I found that my service providers lists those. Since its fixed numbers and no range they may well be minimum and faster is better. Talking about video/tv streaming service they offer which I'm not subscribed to. ;-)