The art direction, sound design, and world building are really next-gen shit. Anyone who says the city feels "dead" because you can't go bowling or whatever needs to have their head checked.
I don't think many here are denying that the city is an impressive visual/audio achievement in terms of art design and graphics, and that just visually and aurally it's incredibly immersive. By a country mile, it's the best thing of its kind in any videogame yet. For me, the paradigmatic Night City experience is cruising through the streets on a rainy night, listening to Miles Davis on the radio. That experience, as an immersive experience, is almost worth the $60 just by itself. One's mind just automatically fills in a feeling of incredible coolness from those cues - that one is a merc making their way in this awful but beautiful place.
The problem is just that it's not very reactive the closer you get to interacting with it, which breaks the illusion so nicely set up by the visuals. It's like an LSD illusion breaking up as soon as one moves closer to investigate it. And that's mainly to do with the AI, which is everywhere laughably rudimentary, and only marginally better in combat.
I can't help but think it's the sort of stuff that will eventually be improved with patching though, and a lot of other problems eventually sorted out by modders, to taste. What may never be truly finished is depth and complexity to quests, which is sad, because there's enough evidence to show that the plan
was for something much richer at one time.
From mid 2018 to date, CDPR bought an immersive cinematic experience (in the MQ and major SQ cinematics) at the cost of the RPG they'd been developing up to that point, and had promised in numerous trailers and hype vids. If they can claw back some of that RPG in the next year, then it'll all be copacetic; if not, then it'll be forever remembered as a sadly missed opportunity.
