Been playing this game for weeks. I completed it and then started a new game. The game’s story is excellent, but it absolutely does not justify the tedium it makes you endure to experience it. In a 40 minute sitting, I’d spend the entire thing simply having characters dialogue at me. What’s the point of the open world then? Car chases are scripted so that you don’t even have to fire a single shot. The enemies will just eventually blow up. 70% of dialogue choices are just for roleplay and don’t change a thing or make extremely minor changes. The combat and shootouts are mid.
Act 1 is a chore to get through on replay. There are so many touches they could have added to make it interactive. The Flathead robot mission… why not let us pilot the bot in first-person to do all the tasks, like a stealth minigame? I can think of a few games that let you do something similar. Instead, it is 20 or more steps that are essentially “look at this object and wait.”
The best part of the game for me was the middle, where the plot becomes more elaborate, evocative and the relationships with Judy, Panam, Johnny etc develop. But even there the game was navigating me through a seedy open world in order to show me glorified cutscene after cutscene. Then shootouts that were really nothing special.
Witcher 3 was dialogue heavy, nuanced and compelling. It had tedium, but I never felt like the open world was superficial or that the tedium overshadowed the rest of the game. Side tasks like Gwent or contracts were fun and absorbing. The most boring expositional bit was using Witcher sense to explore, but even then at least you were interacting with your surroundings more, not just sitting there being talked at.
Did anyone else feel this way?
I agree the main story isn’t that re-playable, though I’d say phantom liberty is worth 2 playthroughs because the endings diverge pretty heavily and actually have gameplay to go with them. I find the best way to play it is to do minnimal main story, crank up the difficulty, maybe install some mods and then play it as an rpg with all the side gigs.
My mod list: `_----Cyber Engine Tweaks----
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/107----Dependancy Mods----
RED4ext
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/2380
TWEAK-XL
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/4197
REDSCRIPT
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/1511
CODEWARE
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/7780
ARCHIVE-XL
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/4198
EQUIPMENT-EX
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/6945
MOD-SETTINGS
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/4885?tab=files&file_id=72402&nmm=1----Overhaul Mods----
Responsive NPCs
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/14800
Night City Alive
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/10395?tab=files&file_id=87729&nmm=1
Random Netrunners
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/16475----Fashion----
Immersive First Person
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/2675
Virtual Atelier
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/2987?tab=files
Virtual Atelier all clothes
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/5544?tab=description
Browser Extension
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/10038__`Installed just using Vortex Mod Manager, played on very hard and trying to pick the stats and gear that I think I would pick if I actually got isekai’d into cyberpunk or something, also no crafting guns except when home at my apartment.
Yea, this game is extremely shallow.
Yeah, it’s no Baldur’s Gate 3, and I do hope they learn more lessons from contemporary CRPGs, but I’d say it has other strengths. I liked the combat, and I liked the story, characters, and world-building. Open worlds in most open world games are pretty shallow, and I’d say both this and The Witcher 3 follow that same template to the same ends, but at the very least, it allows you to approach an objective how you’d like after scouting it out, which feels satisfying. It’s RPG-lite, which manifests as a pretty good action game with some story branching, and I’m not upset about that, as much as I’d prefer they lean into the RPG stuff harder.
I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it’s as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase. And many things in the game actually reinforce that idea.
I played the game at launch and the game was absolutely infested with stupid and annoying bugs, so eventually I just skipped all side stuff and just wrapped up the main story, I think that was about half-way through. Back then the open-world most definitely felt like an afterthought.
No events were happening in the world, there were entire parts of the city that were dead and empty. There were even areas blocked off by doors that were “locked” and implied there was something behind it, but some of those places I could just clip through and fall through the world because there was literally nothing behind the door.
There were few things that made it seem like an actual living world, NPCs were just wandering aimlessly, doing nothing. Just making a cool looking area and then dropping a load of copy/paste NPC clones in there doesn’t make a good open-world. If you comitted a crime the police would just spawn behind you, wherever you were. While in contrast some of the story areas seemed more detailed and have more “scripted” things happening, which is part of why I think the game wasn’t originally open-world.
Gameplay wise it was not that special either, gunplay was okay, melee felt quite unsatisfying, and outside of combat there was practically nothing to do other than just driving around. The choices you make at the beginning of the game don’t ever felt like they mattered, like they make it appear it’s a huge backstory thing that would play a role throughout the game. Nope, after the first 15 minutes it’s never mentioned again. The whole cutscene thing with Jackie after the intro feels like it was supposed to be actual gameplay, but was just cut out and changed to a cutscene to skip time.
Also the skill tree barely mattered, there were even skills like being able to breathe underwater longer, even though there wasn’t any underwater content, aside from one Judy mission I believe (which I didn’t get because she wasn’t accessible as a romance option to my character).
The only saving grace of this game was that parts of the story and characters were somewhat interesting, I liked the concept and style of the game. But it felt like a bad game when it came to actual gameplay. And some characters barely got any time to actually become interesting enough to care about.
I’ve been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.
There is no chance it wasn’t meant to be an open world. The witcher 3 was a very successful open world they made.
Also, CP77 actually is in the style of elden ring that was praised for it, but CP77 came long before it. Most critiques of CP77 missed that part because the game doesn’t throw it at your face.
exactly, it’s well known the original scope was actually TOO big and they had to scale down.
I think the “breath underwater” perk in a game with literally no missions where you need to touch water except one - where you have a divesuit anyways - is the best example of how shallow the game is.
I like Cyberpunk. Not as much as the Witcher 3 and I think that’s mostly because I didn’t like the npcs as much. Jackie is about the only one you have a positive relationship with and he’s gone in an instant.
I haven’t played Cyberpunk, but I already felt that way about The Witcher 3, to some extent. CDPR makes nice looking games with seemingly vibrant and populated worlds, but I feel like interaction with the world and NPCs is pretty thin and boring.
Man, Witcher 3 is an amazing game and a lot of the secondary quests had a pretty alluring story. I read the books too, but the game is really great. Just the combat system is a bit tedious but apart from that the game world and the story was absolutely beautiful
I played both games on Xbox and i like it!Cyberpunk77 i bougth since day one had lot of bugs but for me was playable on that time even with bugs lol!I like the story mode but my expectations was more higher!For me the Witcher 3 was i had a best experience and the longivity of the game is insane!Both games are good but different styles!
Act 1 is a chore to get through on replay.
Good news is if you have the DLC you can skip the first act. The DLC start puts you in front of the Church in Pacifica after fighting Placide.
I like Cyberpunk a lot but replayability is shallow like you say. Sometimes I just boot it up to punch npcs though. Make a gorilla arms build and go ham. It’s pretty cathartic.
Tell me you haven’t dug deep into Cyberpunk 2077 without telling me you haven’t dug deep into Cyberpunk 2077.
My dude, the easter eggs have easter eggs.
easter eggs don’t make a game deep or replayable.
Depends on the easter egg though, no? Look up FF:06:B5 and see how deep is that for you.
If you have to dig that deep, then it’s probably not worth it digging (for me at least).
You know, I had heard a lot about how much Cyberpunk had improved since launch, but I still couldn’t really convince myself to try it. “Cyberpunk game made by big corporate studio” always just struck me as something of an oxymoron.
With all due respect but no indie studio can create a game of this magnitude. I mean there is a lot of work put into it. Whether it was worth it is a completely different story though.
I mean, sure, you’re not wrong. It’s just that cyberpunk as a genre is pretty strongly linked to anti-capitalist and anti-corporate themes, and I think a triple-A game published by a big corporation is not very likely to adhere to the spirit of the genre.
