I dont want to kill your hype guys, but there are some major issue in role playing aspect other than voiced protagonist.
As the title said, apprantly cyberpunk 2077 will have less stats than what we get in CP2020 PnP RPG. There will be no Attractiveness, Body type, Movement Allowance, Luck, and hell even no Empathy stat! You know why especially the last stat is important, its basically deal with the core issue of the setting that is cyberpsychosis. It also deal with persuasive based skill, in essence its a version of charisma stat.
Move to the class, apparantly you could only play or gain three skill from each class (solo, netrunner, techie). Again i dont understand if we get a RPG with total customization of character and background yet why they scrap the other class. Especially with voiced protagonist, i have suspicion that character customization and roleplaying in this game will not be that open.
I really, really
HATE the voiced protag.
Worked great in the Witcher. You're playing Geralt.
Here, it's a terrible mistake. More on that later.
As to stats, more is always better so long as they are useful or can at least legitimately help roleplaying. I'm normally not a fan of stats that take the place of my own thoughts.
For example, I'm perfectly happy to have a Charisma stat, because I may think I want to say something a certain way, but the delivery of that thought is dependent on Charisma and a Speech skill. This makes sense.
Things get a bit iffier when you start moving towards speech checks based on knowledge derived from stats, like an Intelligence stat. It can work very well, or it can work very poorly. So in other words, I'm all for good implementation, but don't give me options to say something and fail VS saying the same thing and succeeding purely based on a non-speech related stat.
Thus we get to empathy. Because of its role in cyberpunk, I think it's absolutely necessary. Since we as the players aren't actually getting cybernetic implants, I can't think of any way to replicate the loss of empathy outside of a pure LARP. And for the record, I think LARPing has its place, but it functionally doesn't fit here at all.
Streamlining all these stats + the emphasis on voiced dialogue makes me think they're focusing the pen and paper part of roleplaying almost entirely on combat, while leaving the decision-making levels part of roleplaying outside the class system entirely. This choice largely borrows from the Witcher games (axii was usually an afterthought for dialogue). In other words, CDPR found a formula that people liked in the past, so they're going to copy and paste it. This is the problem (and benefit) of game studios in general -- they find formulas they like. Sometimes it results in trimming shit and improvement in some areas, and sometimes it results in total lack of willingness to look at things from a new perspective. Stagnation is the result in the longrun.
I expect the action roleplaying elements of this game will be excellent. I bet you'll be able to feel like a very different kind of combatant by the endgames of different playthroughs if you want to.
Conversely, the dialogue roleplaying elements will be hit or miss. C&C seems like it will be present in droves, and we'll be happy with it. The issue comes from how we reach those consequences when dialogue is front and center. On one level, I really do enjoy being able to say what I would want to say -- i.e. LARP the dialogue -- and call it a day. In a sense, a LARPing dialogue system is built into the game by the player itself, and not through a spreadsheet. All good RPGs have this to an extent via choosing what you're going to say. As you edge closer to a pure LARPing dialogue system, you start to look more like Morrowind (personality and speech affect prices and persuasion, while everything else is purely LARPed). But if CDPR is going to choose this Morrowindish general route, then they already royally fucked it up by having a voiced protag. You can't LARP as a dude who doesn't speak the way you want him to speak.
So what we have is a game with conflicting visions of dialogue -- an understanding that the player can LARP the dialogue vis a vis delivering that dialogue in a way that completely destroys any possibility of LARPing. The problem is the direct result of CDPR getting too comfortable with the success it had with the Witcher's dialogue, and therefore not being able to see the fundamental merits and demerits of that kind of a system and how it could transfer over to Cyberpunk.
I dub Cyberpunk 2077 cautiously incline, but with the possibility of sharp and heart-wrenching decline.