I'm 120 hours played, just before the point of no return main story section, so I'm finishing up other bits. Great story, great characters, great voice work, stunning visuals (for the most part) and some silly bugs, sloppy AI, I really don't like some of the sound bugs - I got stuck with a 3 chord riff of johnny's that played over a large story section which spoiled it somewhat and contacts phoning and talking over other story dialogue.
I kept away from all CP hype, previews etc and so went in blind and I've enjoyed the game.
I enjoyed the game too and the city is very distinctive IMHO. I think the art design and direction is excellent. Graphics can be hit and miss for me - some aspects can be amazing,but then some aspects can clash and look a tad unfinished. Voice acting is great for the main characters,but for the random NPCs the lack of voice lines and variety makes it even worse than old RPG games. In some other games you could actually have more than the one liners sprouted at you. The side stories are actually quite interesting but very,very shallow.
The issue is I am not seeing much in terms of replayability here especially as its billed as an RPG. Its a good game overall,but it had so much more potential in the RPG part.
If you look at The Witcher 3 the percentage falloff was much lower,and it consistently stayed high in the Steam rankings for years,because of its replayability. Apparently now CDPR are downplaying the RPG aspects,but really talked a lot about it for years. After all this game is based on the Cyberpunk 2020 pen and paper RPG which has a lot of backstory to it.
Even the two other life choices only change a bit at the start,and don't affect the rest of the gameplay as much as you think. CDPR was saying originally how each of the life choices would make a big difference but it doesn't. In fact a lot of stuff has been removed from what they originally talked about a few years ago:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/posts/34420479/
You can kind of see it in many sidequests,which start and then suddenly end very abruptly and have no impact on the main storyline,even though they should. So they imply a greater story but have no payback WRT to the final outcomes. Compare this to the Witcher 3,Mass Effect games or old RPGs such as Fallout:New Vegas,where there were very real consequences for what you did in the world,and there were multiple ways of trying to work around things. Even have a different follower could change a bloody outcome to a peaceful one.
It seems like CDPR ran out of time and couldn't integrate them into the main story. Even one of the characters which was implied to have a greater impact in the story and was shown in the demos,basically had their story cut back massively.That is the problem - people have put 100s of hours into the Witcher 3 and other RPG games. People play these games for years over several different characters. So I am hopeful CDPR can integrate this cut content over the next year into this game. If not I am uncertain within 12~24 months how many will be left playing this unless the modding community comes to the rescue! CDPR releases games every 5 years,so I am concerned TBF!
