Man, I'm done, later when I have the patience to play all the endings, I will see all the options.
I cant say I didnt have fun, this is the best Ubisoft game ever made, a very barebones Deus Ex game, an unfinished GTA clone in alpha state, a single player MMO because CDPR wanna be the new Rockstar and wanna Cyberpunk online to print as much money as GTA online does, ironic a game about corporate greed being actually the bedrock for massive corporate greed . Now, all that together, guess what that did to the game? It is a fucking mess, it is a car crash, you know it is fucked up on many ways but it is fascinating at the same time, it is like a Porsche and a Ferrari crashed and are all mangled up but you see over there that once they were good looking cars.
I think Night City is beautiful and most of my playthrough was seeing the sights and wasting time walking around, it is the strongest asset of the game and it is also the source of most of its problems. As I explored the city, it became more and more evident the sacrifices they made to fill that space. If you have to fill a huge city, you will have to cut corners on side content and each side quest must take a limited scope as you are going to need alot of them.
The problem of alot of small sidequests instead of bigger, proper missions that a hub based game would have is that this game also tries to be a Deus Ex game. Most missions occupy a really small area, Night City gives the impression of being a big city but most of it is dead space, only scenery and meaningless gameplay wise. A level like Hell's Kitchen on Deus Ex has each inch of it filled with gameplay goodness, that sort of density is impossible to achieve on an open world game. So, most missions actually fill a really small gameplay bubble space with actual meaningful gameplay interaction, this lead to hilarious situations of you having to enter on a store, a door is gated by technical ability but you only need to turn a corner to find an open window making you scratch your head and ask, what is the point? You cant also populate a whole level with numerous enemy patrols because there isnt enough space for that.
This design fucks with the flow of the game. You begin a mission, you end it in 2 mins, you start a mission, you end it in 2 mins, this start and stop gameplay flow that go nowhere and dont reach a climax make gigs really repetitive and unsatisfying.They took a basic Deus Ex template gameplay, made a few basic changes to it and copy pasted on the whole game. A hub based cyberpunk game (now that would be actually huge incline) was a concept that they never tried because their goal was to ape GTA, an open world city sells alot and it is here where they are being mostly criticized. Normies dont give a fuck of how broken the gameplay is just that their GTA clone isnt working as intended and there arent enough minigames and shit.
While those sorts of criticisms make my eyes roll, they are correct on an area, they sacrificed alot in terms of gameplay to make Night City but they gained very little from it. The game isnt dynamic, it isnt that there arent ganger and police shootouts, they exist, but they are scripted to happen on certain points. The gangs dont react to what you do, the police are even worse and teleport in the spot after you commit a crime but there are no roadblocks, nothing. The only reason CDPR left the bizarre way police teleport to you location in the game was because not having it would be even worse.
The gangs and the police not chasing you on an agressive fashion actually make that start and stop gameplay of the side missions even worse as those little gameplay bubbles where the side missions exist dont communicate at all with the exterior world. GTA sort of disguise its popamole primitive mission design with long and dynamic police chases. Having MaxTac or ganger chromed assassins chasing your ass for half the city would be a hell of an incentive to be stealthy and an excellent opportunity to shoot alot of, high level, and dangerous targets if you actually wanted to shoot shit. I wont even talk of the bugs on their little GTA simulation, they are a meme at this point.
The game itemization and level scaling also makes it a single player MMO and as all MMOs, you are always awesome as default, your build only says how much awesome you are. The perk system is pretty much optional and just an extra bonus for you to have an incentive of doing all those side quests but if you keep doing moderate side jobs, you will do fine without any perk on anything. What the perk system does is to turn a really easy game because of level scaling on a broken easy game, just that.
So, if the game has so many flaws, why I kept playing? Well, because of Night City and because it is a pretty good Ubisoft game, most of the criticism said above is entirely applicable to a regular Ubisoft game or any popamole open world game. I had fun with the jumping and slow time cyberware, doing Parkour, seeing the little stories on the city and shooting enemies through walls or with tracking guns, also hacking cameras to reach an elimination target, hacking him and telling him to suicide, completing a mission without even entering on it is very amusing. They had a few innovations on the basic Ubisoft gameplay template that I really liked, unfortunately, wasnt enough to actually make a game with its own identity, their hacking implementation being an example of wasted potential.
If CDPR advertised this game honestly as an Ubisoft game and an improved version of Far Cry and Watch Doges, we wouldnt be having this 200 pages plus discussion. I dunno why Infinitron insist into keeping this on the RPG tab, this is just a mass market product, nothing more.
I mean, everything above is sort of expected and anyone that expected otherwise was deluded by the hype, what surprised me was how CDPR failed on an spectacular fashion the GTA experience the masses wanted and how they dropped the ball on the main story. Man, it is funny to hear Johnny Silverhand complaining about the corps while his presence on the game was an entirely corporate, marketing decision.
The main problem is, your character dies on the prologue, after that, it is Johnny Silverhand show because CDPR wanted that Keanu Reeves hype, baby. What? Roleplaying on a game that is derived from a PnP rpg? What is this? RPG is for nerds. Lets suck Keanu Reeves balls so he never fades away. Some characters that are interesting and setting relevant are on Johnny's timeline and have a relationship with him and not you and the few that are interesting on your timeline, the game murders them so fast to the point of, man this dude is cool... bam, shock value, sad time, he is dead. Some characters are walking archetypes like the rebelious girl that is right in the end with Panam, the good cop that fights against corruption and save the day with River, the criminal with a heart of gold with Jackie (while Jackie actually get interesting right before he dies as you see hints that he would be able to do everything it took to get out of the slum life and there was a hidden edge in all this comraderie of his)
It isnt that the story makes no sense, it does and it does it job of keeping you curious on a base level and have its high points(even if they spoiled fucking half of it on the gameplay trailers). I was feeling completely disconnected because it was Johnny's show and I was just a schmuck on the wrong place at the wrong time. They would be doing better by coming up with some bullshit, fully reviving Johnny, and you playing with him on his timeline as they did with Geralt. They wanted the cake and eat it too, to have the player have "his" character and also Keanu Reeves as the marketing poster boy, it didnt work so well for me.
