I never expected CP2077 to be any kind of a 'life simulator", despite what any of the promo videos or articles showed or said about it.
Sure, they were ambitious, too ambitious. Were they lies, or were they embellishments?
The intelligent person can parse all that out with the memory and knowledge of what CDPR's previous games were like and not be disappointed when the final game comes out. It was basically exactly what I thought it would be -- in fact, actually, during the first few "scripted" missions, and way before all the subsequent patches, the game was better and more simulator-like than I had expected.
My resentment towards CDPR isn't based on what they promised. It's based on them cow-towing to the console crowd and nearly ruining what had already been a p. good PC game.
Well, I dunno, I didn't expect a "life simulator", but I did imagine CDPR would evolve their designs a bit rather than simply CTRL+C/V The Witcher 3's formula. It was plain clear that Night City would need such developments, but I guess those laurels got too comfy not to take a nap on.
There's literally no minigames.
Incline! Whenever you're playing a minigame, you're not playing the game you actually paid for. With all the things wrong with Cyberpunk, not being able to play taxi driver is the least of its concerns.
Most of the world is empty, some of it is clearly unfinished. The only real content that got any polish was MQ and main side quests that are rather lengthy. Compare to Witcher 3, where almost every nook of the world has some one-off quest that while not big bucks production at least has some tidbit of interesting, story, dialogue, or choice.
Half right on this one, because it's actually an issue of perception. I wouldn't be surprised if Cyberpunk's "content per square mile" is actually
higher than The Witcher 3's, but the problem is that the latter could afford it because it had vast stretches of contextually appropriate negative space - you don't expect to have much to interact with in the middle of the bloody forest, and it makes sense that Geralt is crossing dozens of bloody forests. Night City doesn't work the same way, you've got this massive, towering city and it quickly becomes apparent (and frustrating) that you've got fuck all ways to interact with it and its denizens most of the time. Actually, Night City's a scaled up Novigrad, but Novigrad gets away with it because you only linger so long in it at a time before you head back into the wilderness.
The other critical aspect that feeds into this negative perception is how side content gets dispensed, and this was a massive and
gratuitous screwup on CDPR's part - fixers. In TW3, you ramble around and run into NPCs that need stuff done, whereas in CBP, most of these sidequests are supplied as very formulaic Offers You Can't Refuse over the phone as soon as you approach their area. This strips another apparent interaction from Night City, disincentivising the player from exploring and paying attention to the actors around them, and further reinforces the impression that Night City is "empty" and opaque.
And when you factor in the stuttering pacing of this side content, that so much of it takes place in mini-levels you clear in five to ten minutes, you've got this noxious trifecta of bad decisions that make the world feel static, like a backdrop, rather than what the player was pining for in a dense, rich urban environment. In a nutshell, it's not that Cyberpunk is lacking content, it's that it structures and serves it up in the dullest, least gratifying way it could.
