GPS Minimap is p. neat. It simply enables the minimap automatically whenever you get on a motorcycle or enter a car, then disables it the instant you get off or exit the car.
It's an immersion thing, and requires Cyber Engine Tweaks, but it works perfectly.
That's what I got Limited HUD for, auto-toggling the minimap. I hate having it in general, but it's absolutely necessary for driving around. But Limited HUD covers a lot of other UI items as well and it's worth getting it even if you gotta dig around in its .json to configure it. You can have a completely HUD-less screen with components only popping in the right situation.
The game isn't bad, just mediocre on every level. Everything in it some game before already did better.
Agreed, been saying it all along, it's not terrible, just middling across the board. The only thing terrible about is what an utterly wasted opportunity it was.
Exploration is worse in Cyberpunk 2077 than in The Witcher 3
To be fair, cities are just not as innately pleasant or interesting to humans as variable wilds and wide open expanses. We like things like 'forest bathing' for a reason. Eventually the oddities of NC become almost mundane when we acclimatise to them. Same as moving to any new city that seems novel at first. We seem to tire less of natural landscapes.
It's not that, it's a combination of extreme level-scaled design that trivialises loot, thus disincentiving exploration, and the structuring of spaces and interactions, like he mentioned further down his list. CBP's Night City, like the settings of GTA or Saint's Row and other games like that, is fundamentally designed as an outdoors space where most of what you see is essentially decor. That works fine for TW3, contextually, but it creates a level of dissonance in an urban setting because you instinctively expect a greater degree of interactivity from shops and people than you do from ravines and squirrels.
Comparatively, spaces like DX4's Prague and, to a lesser degree, even Fo4's crumbling Boston don't feel anywhere near as sterile and superficial because those games are designed with a completely different approach to interactivity and the balance of indoors and outdoors spaces. In CDPR's defense, it would be a daunting undertaking to try and build anything approaching that nature of space on a scale and density befitting Night City, but between how they structured the game space and other issues to do with navigation, gameplay systems and object affordances, it's obvious they didn't even try. Design-wise, they just slapped neon trims on a gigantic Novigrad and figured it would be enough. It wasn't.
P.S. We like "forest bathing" because we're all drowning in a sea of filthy concrete from birth. If you lived most of your life in the forest, you'd love the occasional "city bathing" and marvel at the remarkable scarcity of mosquitoes.
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