Not at all how i felt when i completed the game. It's buggy yes but Bethesda have released every single game they have ever made in way worse a state. I should know since i have completed those too. Strange how bugs in a Polish game with links to anti-DRM is getting so much flak when American games that are way way worse haven't for... well since back when a bad game could get 0 rating and not a 6 as they do now.
The core narrative is broken.
WARNING SPOILERS!!!!
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The whole Johnny schtick is an utter disgrace to RPG design, this isn't an RPG anymore it's a GTA5 wanna-be.
The prolog is great it works flawlessly the combat in it is also good which is suspect is because it's heavily scripted.
How this should've worked out is that the whole story of the chippening and Johnny should've been mechanically integrated into the narrative.
Firstly you are told you have two weeks to live but there are no repercussions to just fucking off and doing side quests for 6 months in game time. There should be a trade off between the power you can gain from doing missions and the damage the chip is doing to your brain.
Secondly the whole concept multiple personalities should've been a game mechanics it's a goldmine for a morality and loyalty system that actually fits perfectly within the nerrative.
You as a player get 3 options, Fight/Control Johnny, become Johnny or become something new this could've been the basis of a morality system that isn't good/evil and you could've essentially had 3 factions that represent your moral compass.
The people who knew V before the chippening, Jackie should not have been killed he should've served as the moral compass for old V, Johnny's old gang like rogue and the new factions/chars you meet in the game after the chippening like Panam and her nomad tribe.
I loved TW3 despite all it's flaws, and I've actually created a lot of mods for TW1 and TW2 I'm not American, my GF is Polish I actually know people who worked at CDPR on previous games so please stop with this whole poor polish schtick it's unbecoming, CDPR has no longer the benefit of being an indie/small studio when they are working on games with a budget of over $300M. Their long term support for their titles is admirable but it doesn't excuse the piss poor state of the game considering that Cyberpunk 2077 had a bigger development budget than freaking GTA IV and probably in the same ballpark as RDR2....
On one hand, I totally agree with you: your suggestions would make for a far more mechanically and morally interesting game, and it's a shame that the promise set out during the first two hours of the game doesn't really pan out in the end.
On the other hand, I still have not felt this immersed in a game world and character stories since... well, since maybe The Witcher 3, and before that Planescape: Torment and Terranigma.
Other games have done specific aspects better (e.g. original Deus Ex in terms of level design; Horizon: Zero Dawn in terms of action; RDR2 & GTAV in terms of open-world sandbox; TW3 in terms of sheer story-telling quality.) However, I still find myself role playing my character in a way that I didn't do with any of those games. I have turned off my minimap and most HUDs to increase my immersion. I drive 99% of the time, instead of using the fast-travel system, because driving and listening to the radio is so damn immersive that I want to stay in that world. I actually care about what is happening to the various characters, even if there is little mechanical pay-off for following a particular path. The first-person camera helps create that illusion of being part of that world. There are bugs, yes, but even a t-posing NPC or a floating item is not sufficient to break that immersion.
As far Johnny... my character dislikes him. I oppose him on every turn. However, he still manages to get into my head, and convince me to do things that my character would not have otherwise done. There is no mechanical impact - yet he still changes my/my character's behaviour.
Is this a perfect game? No, far from it, even with all the inevitable bug fixes. However, no other game has created such an immersive experience for me in recent memory, if ever.
For that element alone, I am thankful for not buying into the negativity and giving this a try.
(Playing on Geforce NOW at Ultra/Psycho settings averaging ~40fps. No crashes so far. Input latency is fine - this is an RPG and the combat is on the easy side, so it doesn't really make any difference.)
I've encountered 100's of bugs playing through the game for about 25 hours ranging from annoying like you can't loot certain items because of how they clip with the ground, or you get stuck in scanner mode until your reload the game to completely broken quest lines and heck some perks break the game completely like the looting mods perk from droids once you have it you can't loot droids anymore you see the drop icons but you can't loot them.
I also had conversations get stuck because the UI doesn't load, scripted events bugging out etc.
This game is far more buggy than say Mass Effect Andromeda that was shat on by everyone for how buggy and well lame it was.
As for the RPG elements they are essentially non existent there is absolutely no impact to your choices, and most importantly you have no way of actually dealing with Johnny or anything else the way you want it it all ends up the same. There is absolutely no reputation factor here, street cred might as well be called XP since it's the same thing there should've been actual gameplay mechanic in which the way you deal with situations and missions actually impacts your street cred after a bunch of missions you would get a reputation say bully, maniac, white knight, hassler etc. that would change how characters react to you and the options you get or do not get in future situations.
This wouldn't be hard to actually implement but CDPR seemed to have dropped all RPG elements from the game which is ironically in line with some of the Glassdoor reviews from a couple of years ago: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-CD-PROJEKT...
As for the immersion I personally don't get it, driving just feels terrible (even with mods), there is no easy way to get new vehicles other than buying them, there is no vehicle customization and oh boy don't let me start on gear customization... I'm ok with the entire alt/punk look of the game but seriously some of the gear is just stupid I'm not kidding when I say I'm wearing a bathroom, a spiked braw, a gas mask, a pink bunny hat, diaper and loafers because of stats that to me is a major immersion breaker when your character is forced to look like that because of the sandbox.
The game deserves most of the negative reviews it got for being released as a buggy mess, it doesn't deserve the reviews of OMG they have dildos in shops and prostitutes.
But this game cost a fortune to develop it had a budget of more than $300M that's more than GTA 5, it had constant delays and it still released with so many bugs that other than management saying fuck it we don't care about our reputation there is no other explanation to why it was released at this time.
Even if CDPR wouldn't have actually decided to make an RPG out of it but released it as a polished product there would be no questions that this game would've been received we a lot of praise. The issue is that mechanically it is weak in so many gameplay aspects like crafting and combat, it's buggy as hell and it doesn't have really interesting narrative mechanics to compensate for those flaws.
TW1 was a horrible horrible mess when it was released, in fact without player mods especially those that change the combat it's still a poor experience but the story was great and you actually had to make good decision despite the limitations of both the engine and the studio at the time. TW2 was them basically trying to make a AAA game for the first time and almost nailing it, they had to make a lot of sacrifices to get it to run on consoles which is why it had about as much of a scope area wise as TW1 AKA Swamp and Back Again (with a detour to the fields of lag).
TW3 was, well something else the combat still wasn't that great without balance mods but the overall combat mechanics were deep and that is by a large part thanks to it's setting where you can have more "boss fights" than in a game like CP2077.
The enemies in CP2077 are boring because they are human there is so much you can get by making them into bullet sponges without having the same issues as games like The Division have where you can dump 5 whole box magazines of a light machine gun into someone's face without them dying. Honestly CDPR should've added many more bots and cyborgs into the game and gave them much bigger abilities it would make encounters more interesting while not breaking the immersion of you dumping 600 rounds into someone and only taking 30% of their health bar down.
I can only hope someone at CDPR is still left that appreciates these ideas and has them too and the CDPR will 2-3 years down the line release an enhanced edition of the game, sadly because they've decided to have Keanu play Johnny it will make things harder because adding narrative mechanics would likely require quite a few voice over changes, but maybe they'll be able to deepfake it by then who knows...
