Posted December 12, 2021
That said, ignore the bad reviews because it's a fantastic game that was crippled by a bunch of crybabies who had absurdly unrealistic expectations. If you enjoy narrative-driven RPGs and open world action-adventure games, you'll love this game. It's a fully playable game with lots of great content. It took me almost 100 hours to finish my first playthrough; granted, I took my time, but still, the bad press was almost entirely unfair, I can say that much.
You can make very minor changes along the way, but mainly you personalization of V comes down to what weapons you're using, what skills you invest in, and which meaningless respawns you slaughter. As far as quests are concerned, the game can't be arsed to really do anything with how you finish quests, so whether you solved something by murdering 5000 random people or by being a sneaky git, it's solved and that's what matters.
Frankly, this is RPG mechanics at the level of Diablo, Titan Quest, Path of Exile, and so on.
In terms of crippling the game, the "crybabies" aren't the root cause. Just CDPR being utterly incompetent while promising features that they knew a year before release were not going to make it into the game. Most of the technical bugs are fixed at this point, but the gameplay is just as pathetic, hollow, and schizophrenic as it always was. The game simply doesn't know if it's an action shooter or an RPG or a looter-shooter or a story-driven adventure game.
As a looter-shooter, there's just not enough variance in the loot and none of it is really all that exciting. Further, there really isn't any good gameplay cycles for generating enormous piles of loot. Thus it isn't a very good looter-shooter.
As an action shooter, the shooter gameplay gets incredibly stale rather fast. Enemy variance is just about non-existant, interesting areas to run and gun in are rare, getting a good enemy density is rare, the AI is approximately on par with Wolfenstein 3D and the old Doom 1 and 2, and guns just don't feel all that different, in no small part because CDPR fucked up and tied everything to player, enemy, and item levels, hence a level 15 water pistol becomes a hammer of the gods against level 10 enemies whereas a shot in the face from a level 5 sniper rifle does next to nothing.
As an RPG, well, I've gone through that already. You never get to make V your character and the game really isn't about V anyway. All the questlines are rather flat, all the dialogue is mostly awful, dialogue choice is something that happens to other games, and where are the NPCs that you're supposed to interact with? There's a handful of quest givers and some phone calls. Wow. Fallout 76 probably has more actual NPCs at this point.
And as an adventure game, there has to be funny shit to discover. There has to be actual adventure to be had. This game has just about none of that and it more or less punishes you for going out of your way to find new stuff. You'll get into overleveled areas where the level balancing will crush you, or you'll find the occasional unique or "legendary" item at a level so low that it becomes useless right away. And the more you explore, the more you realise that the city is just an empty husk. There's no life, there's no soul, and there's really no point to anything.
Lastly, regarding cut content, they promised us a living city. They gave us a dead husk. They promised us an RPG. They gave us a looter-shooter adventure game. They promised us a Night City we could explore. They gave us a facade that looks good at a distance but which doesn't actually contain anything. And the truth is, we're not getting any of that. Not now, not next year, not ever. We're not getting smart cars, we're not getting deep roleplaying, we're not getting a game with AI that isn't flat out garbage, we're not getting actual dynamic NPCs, and we're never going to just roam around Night City looking for something new and interesting to happen.
I've spent far too many hours on this game and if anything, the bad press was too mild. The bad decisions that a couple of CDPR executives made, seemingly with the full blessings of the shareholders since they haven't been fired, led to one of the biggest mismatches between marketing and reality in gaming history, on top of releasing a literally broken game. And this has led to a massive loss of goodwill for CDPR, a loss of goodwill that could threaten GOG's existence.
