La vie sexuelle
Learned
Small nods to some of it are still there. There are nutheads on the street and conspiracy freaks on the radio saying that the Arasaka don't age not because of their tech and forturne, but because they're vampires. I remember hearing that there was a whole underground section of the map where you might've had a mission with vampires too, which was cut.I kinda wish the devs tried to add all of the crazy shit of the pnp game this game is based on. As a 90s pnp, it had everything ranging from blatantly stealing from WoD, to random stuff like Biotechnica making panthers with optical camo and laser eyes "to protect them from poachers", genetically engineered werewolves, not-vampires stolen from Cybercity Oedo 3, gangs of teenagers that do kung-fu and in one of the supplements acquired nanotech magic superpowers, furries of all kinds, etc.
But that would likely scare away people and take ages to render.
While the game is pretty shallow in the elements it offers I don't think I'd say this is because of them working on top of aborted versions of it, it's probably just because both a lack of clear focus/vision and because that's what they could get running before release. Why is there a craft system in the game? Well, every other AAA game has one so we must too. How do we make it work? Oh, uhhhh... how do other games do it? alright, let's just have it so it's your typical number-go-up and you get materials as common drops/recycling unwanted items. Easiest way to do it, we don't have time for anything else. Ship it.snip
Same thing with the police system, the cyberware system, the swimming, the UI. I'd say the only thing that might fit the "this was here before; let's work on it" argument would be the city map itself. There's absolutely zero reasons for it to be as vertical as it currently is when your character doesn't have a way to easily access those places and there's no real content to be found there. There are a lot of left overs you might find in it, and places like Pacifica really feel like they just ran out of time to properly finish it as is.
I think the aborted versions have a lot to do with the lack of a coherent vision. If you don't know what you're doing, or if you flag-change your goals according to what's popular, you'll never know what is "my main path" is. This vision from the first trailer, the one similar to Blade Runner, was the most complete Cyberpunk interaction CDP has ever made. After that there was only thing, that Germans call "polnische wirtschaft".
If you mean that the game is graphically stitched together, while I can kind of see it, it doesn't look wrong for this genre. It kinda fits honestly. You see a fat blob redneck with a greasy wifebeater and cargoshorts struggling his way through the streets? Yeah, it's (nu) america, this place is a shithole, it fits. You see the ugliest, bald, multicolored randomly generated NPC with one (1) robot leg? It's a futuristic dystopia, why wouldn't there be someone like this? etc etc. The city itself is the same. Being stiched together like that doesn't stand out that much in this setting in particular, more so if they tried to put some thought into it. Models and textures look great even in first person which is something very few open world games like this can pull off.
It just doesn't seem like they had a bunch of different games and stitched it together, at least for me. It just seems like they wanted to implement too many things and they ran out of time/where stretched too thin.
Yes, from a conceptual point of view, CDP created a certain vision of cyberpunk for the marketing campaign, but it is a shallow vision, limited to only a few determinants. I also think that the most interesting thing they added to the set is one that they never properly developed - the pornographisation urban space. This would be true cyberpunk, i.e. bringing the nightmares of our everyday life to the extreme. We are already familiar with large corporations, but hardly anyone understands how great the pressure of pornography is on our culture and lives. Ellis brushed against something like this in the comic "Transmetropolitan", but that was a long time ago. Those moronic ratings that make players stupid kids are also to blame.