It's as much of an RPG as any other recent action-RPG. I'm not sure why anyone would try to claim otherwise.
Is it great? Hell no. I enjoyed it enough to finish, but I was kind of glad when it was over. I played it at release though, so I have no idea how much of an impact all those patches have had.
90% of stuff in those patches were for consoles and trying to alleviate problems with streaming. 10% were bugfixes for missions and some skills.
If you are on PC then 1.31 is essentially very similar to 1.0 because PC didn't have streaming issues and shitload of bugs caused by them unless you were on potato.
Sort of like the poster above me said. I think if you approach it as a bit of a weird type of game: a looter shooter that's heavily driven by story missions rather than screwing around fighting all the time, that's about where it's at.
warning. criticism rumblings.
More like there is mismatch between expectations and reality. I said this before. People including here were expecting GTA or at minumum witcher 3 with guns. They got tw3light with heavy amount of deus ex/mgs design with more open ended gameplay rather than story.
I mean when it comes to any other game getting your mission solved by multiple avenues hacking/stealth/combat etc. is a positive but here it completely doesn't matter as if it is expectation that this is possible in every game. In TW3 their previous game you could only finish quest in one way, make a choice and then you had either A or B ending of quest usually after hours. I mean there is a reason why going out of main path in GTA/RDR2 leads to "failed" while in C77 it doesn't.
In C77 Pretty much every quest and the more you go outside of main quest the more this exposed is, could be finished in multiple ways. I mean for example the gigs with target you need to take out all have build in outcome where you kidnap target instead of killing it. Enemies in those missions have patterns, there are multiple ways to get into rooms/houses etc. Almost all bosses in game are optional where you can just sneak by them.
It is obvious that C77 has more gameplay than TW3 has and system wise it sits above it. The issue seems to be that C77 isn't storyfag game like TW3 was. So you had people who wanted out of this storyfag game and other people who wanted out of it GTA game. C77 in my opinion ended up as some sort of mish mash between TW3 light and mgs5 in equal amounts. I loved it like that but i can see why both storyfags and GTA people think it is bad game. That being said story itself is amazing imho, especially some of the detail of it so it is not like story itself is bad, just C&C around it is confusing and railoady.
There is also the issue of prologue. IT is clear that people expected 3 different starting points and effectively 3 different main stories. Considering this is CDPR and their TW2 achievement it was something that was possible but unprobeable. For me the most important part that was missing was the timeskip which imho felt like i was missing important part of game but everything after it felt "right" my first playtrough NOMAD felt right. Yeah there was some street kid underlying but the general themes and major philosophical points were on point. It was struggle between losing old family, finding new family, losing family again and again finding new one. The choices in main story simple as they might seem were on point. It feels completely different from RP perspective when you decide what to do with the chip when you just found new family vs when you do street kid and you have essentially nothing and only friend you have is dude in your brain who is everything you want to be but can't or couldn't.
C77 feels right to RP it is just very railroady and requires player to RP instead of game for you to RP your choices. It is best shown by River quest line. In my playtrough i was helping River and at some point killer was taken in by police. But River didn't want to end this way so he gave me a choice to help him kill that dude. If i would play as Streetkid then helping him feels right because as a streetkid you brake rules all the time and it wouldn't feel right not to help him. By my nomad was different. I was just helping guy, family was safe again and it would be stupid for river to risk his job for revenge and again put his family at risk. So i declined, he said he will do it alone.
In game RPing for you that would be the end of quest line followed by some moral debate about law/justice and some shit. Later on like few hours irl later you had dinner with River family. River tells you that he was just by the bed of killer and he almost did it but something stopped him. So they clearly left this as a C&C for player who RP instead of people who follow quest boxes aka gameRP for you.
There is other example of this in my memory. When i was helping out guy meet with his opressors, dude was blackmailed or something. If you follow quest objectives then dude dies because he start to shot guys just like that and dies in combat but there is no "help him fight bad guys[optional]" marker and him dying leads to further part of quest where you talk and go with his killers. Imagine my suprise when on second playthrough i just killed those guys before they could kill guy and quest had different outcome.
So C77 is weird mish mash and how good it is depend on what you expectations were before you started playing.
