A lot of people are complaining about bugs and crashes, so far I haven't experienced anything major - sometimes a cigarret is floating around or someone tries to intimidate me with a powerful T pose, however there are a lot of other things that have changed from the initial promise.

From the 2018 trailer and subsequent trailers we were promised a deeper RPG than the Witcher 3, the character selection pannel seemed a lot more complex and better and the citty was supposed to be 'alive'. Instead the game feels a lot more linear than The Witcher 3, choices don't seem to matter all that much and I don't feel any substancial improvement from the points I gain.

Don't get me wrong, I am loving my experience so far, I love the world, the tech, the story, all of it. But it just doesn't feel like the same game that we have been promised.

Let me know what you think happened

Haven't bought the game yet, because this was exactly what I was afraid of. The Witcher 3 seemed overly ambitious, especially since Witcher 1 and 2 were both pretty bad games, except for their stories which are great. They were plagued by wonky controls, horrendous combat and game design (minigames based on 100% luck), quicktime events, lack of customization (Witcher 1 had only a few armor pieces and weapons) and overall poor gameplay elements, like tying an important roleplaying choice to your carry weight for the rest of the game...

I wasn't looking forward to The Witcher 3 because the first two games showed me the team was missing some very important aspects in game design. Things like story pacing, progression (armor parts) and game design (controls and such). Part 3 turned out te be a masterpiece, yet it seems to be the exception for CDPR.

Reading reviews about Cyberpunk, not from "professional" game reviewers, but from actual gamers who've spent a few days with the game, it seems to confirm my fears. I remember reading pieces in the past about NPCs living their lives, going to bars and clubs with NPCs, things like that which make a world feel more believable. Yet it all seems to be missing. Consensus seems to be an enjoyable main story, but lacking choices and the game world feels dead (aka Witcher 1 again).

I'm going to find out for myself in a few years, after I buy it with at least a 75% discount and with a ton of patches and extra content.

Probably a ton of factors. They could have extended the development, so as not to cut content, but that cost a lot of money and people were angry about the delays. Damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Personally loving the game and have only minor bugs, but two did cause me to have to reload my save. Running super smooth too.

Honestly, this may be a bit of a conspiracy theory here, but I think the Google and to a degree Microsoft and Sony happened.

See everything we saw, would have worked fine on a PC game, that was the original plan. X-box would have worked too, since the generally use the same windows frame, so with a few tweaks would have worked great.

Then suddenly the announce that it'll be on Stadia and different consoles. My guess Google tossed them a ton of up front money in order to port it to the Stadia, and CDPR saw the writing on the wall and realized that Microsoft and Sony would pay a ton of money for ports as well. So they approached them, and both said sure... if you have it ready for a next-gen launch as well.

Which CDPR saw no problem with, since they were planning on launching 6 to 8 months before the next-gen launch. They could get it out on old-gen games, and work on new gen games.

Except it didn't work that way. Stadia may be easy to program and such, but not when you already have the code written and solidified for PC. So they had to work the code for 9 different platforms, all at the same time, with limited resource. They got over their heads, and couldn't dig their way out.

Then they realized that certain things that would work on the PC, wouldn't work on the consoles how they wanted them too, so they had to drop them, and once you start dropping things, it becomes a domino effect since in a game like this, one thing connects directly to another. Add that to things that just never worked right, even on the PC (wall running for example). They probably could have fixed it, if they had the resources, but all those resources were diverted to the console and their ports.

So basically here you have a game that was written, programmed and designed for the PC, that suddenly had resources sucked away from it, because CDPR got too overly ambitious and greedy.

Sounds like a lot of unrealist expectations. NPCs move around and do their thing, you just can't stop and have a convo with them. There are too many and procedurally generated dialogue isn't there yet. There are NPCs doing interesting stuff and a lot you can interact with, but they are spread throughout a large city. For the most part they react they way most people in real life would, and thats to ignore you. I find it to be a lot like Witcher 3 but with a metric ton more NPCs.

Most of the complaints and problems I think can be safely atttributed to people trying to run the game even though their machines either barely or not at all meet the requirements. And yet they somehow expect the game to run flawlessly and at the best fidelity possible.
Also there are a thousand and one other little things that can prevent the game even from starting, despite having a machine that should run it with all bells and whistles. In my case, for example I have to leave raytracing off (even though the 2080Ti in my machine should be more than capable to have it enabled) because, for reasons unknown, the game wouldn't even start if I had raytracing on.

Doesn't even need to be raytracing or DLSS that's the culprit. Can be the antivirus, an overclocking tool, other applications running in the background or something completely and unexpectedly left-field, only specific to your particular setup that causes issues.

The latest, optimized for Cyberpunk 2077 NVidia driver for example, made it just worse for a couple people I spoke with and they could solve the problem by downgrading to the previous one again.

In regards to the console versions CDPR should have just postponed the releases for the previous generation into next year. It was expected that something as complex as Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn't run as stable on the boxes, no surprise here.

Only had a few small graphical glitches and zero game-crashing ones, so no complaints from me here.
It looks phenomenal on 2K, and raytracing from what I've seen on other setups similar to mine doesn't make that much of a difference.

In regards to the RPG aspects it's on par with the Witcher 3, but giving you WAY more opportunities and freedom to approach a problem from all kinds of angles. I'm playing a stealthy netrunner build and I'm having an absolute blast hacking into ALL the things and dispose of the opposing forces by either non-violently bitch-choking them and hiding their bodies or turn them on to themselves (each other as well as literally on themselves, courtesy of the suicide protocol).
I've yet to see how much of an impact completing certain side gigs has on the main objective, so I can't really comment on that yet. Although I expect Bloody Baron-level of branching into different outcomes and resolutions as a result of our previously made choices. Choices, you wouldn't think would have an effect on another (only loosely) related thing, but then, "Surprise, motherfucker", slaps you around the head with the consequences.

Can't agree to the city feeling less alive. Crowd density has been dialed back a bit, no denying about that, but it still feels very much "alive", at least for me.
The market from the 2018 48min gameplay demo (the one that's crossed after calling Meredith Stout, on the way to Viktor Vector) for instance, is still bustling and positively teeming with NPCs, up to the point where you can't avoid bumping into a few at times. So no complaints here, either.

In conclusion - yes, not the exact game that was announced and promised, but definitely one that comes VERY close to it. And still can be improved to get even closer to that near-perfect state.
If CDPR takes the criticism (of course NOT all of it, just the sensible and reasonable) and suggestions (more HUD customizability, being able to rebind ALL keys, options/toggles instead of removing/toning down [like the original braindance flashing/strobing effect], "actual" (not just in the inventory) full frontal nudity for V, etc) to heart.

Management rushed the game out to coincide with ps5 and xone launches,and the stupid decision to make the game compatible with old gen consoles really limited their resources.

Not sure what you mean. Played for about 10h now and feel like the story is quite nice. There is always something to do, you run into sidequests almost everywhere. Are you maybe following the main story line too much?

I'm not really sure what game you were thinking you would get. Feel like this is exactly what it would be, minus the bugs lol Its a solid RPG experience in GTA format which hasn't been done that much I also don't get it why they even ported the game to the regular ps4 and xbox one. I also have a conspiracy theory that they pushed the launch back so that people could get better graphic cards to run this game at 1440 p and 4k. 2080ti can't max it out lol if they released it back in April when they wanted a lot of people would be complaining.

Swedrami, you obviously work for CDPR, please do not post here we are trying to have an honest conversation not your collection of lies.

It wasn't ported for PS4 and Xbox One they were aiming for this generation of consoles along with PC they said this in 2018 twice.

I know what happened.... first, there were promises, then there was reality

I am asking myself what really happened too. I will use words said by my friend.

"The whole game is one big mystery. They had money, they had time, they had people and the result is a non-optimized game full of bugs and absolutely stupid activities, without any real meaningful interaction, without real life and even with a console UI and console controls for the PC. And they also even received grants from Poland for the development!"

I respectfully disagree with these points:

1. It runs ok but certainly not exceptionally well on my RTX 3090 @ 1440p. DLSS and TAA make it excessively blurry so this hopefully can be improved. My only weak point is an older CPU - everything else is way above maximum specs. This game should run perfectly fine on a 2080Ti - it was developed and tested on this card anyway as later cards were just not available.
2. Lots of graphical glitches - not a few. They are no game breaking, but certainly numerous and very visible. Had to reload a quest because it would not complete. Did not have crashes.
3. Story and screenplay wise I don't feel that this came will outdo Witcher 3 - does not have the potential from what I've seen. Side activities are numerous but so far I have not seen an interesting side quest - maybe I'm not deep enough into the game yet. All side quests so far were of the "kill that person" or "kill everyone" variety. Witcher 3 had fantastic side quests.

Mixed feelings so far, will see if it improves as the game progresses.

it was an overly ambitious project from the beginning, I even tend to think that multiple teams have questioned this and told management what was happening with the engine and the game itself multiple times. But you know "we have this huge marketing campaign and what are we going to say to the investors" this was a complex project that needed more time, or the best was to start from scratch with more grounded expectations.

Because this game feels like a bad console port, even though consoles are obviously struggling to run it, lol

I own it on Steam, and have only played it bit but its not grabbed me like TW3 did, it feels like a reskin of the newer Deus Ex games which I wasn't a fan of.

If it keeps just being a reskin then if your thinking about it hold off.