Finally decided to take on the big dog that is Cyberpunk 2077, and have been enjoying it immensely. I paid no attention to all the hype or resulting backlash -- started completely neutral. I'm using a laptop PC with a Ryzen 9 5900, GeForce RTX 3070, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, and a QHD 2560x monitor w/ 165 hz refresh rate -- the ASUS ROG Zephyrus. By default all settings were on the maximum allowed. Other than annoying bugs and glitches, which are right in your face, I haven't had any performance issues. The glitches have all been with characters bouncing around, vehicles overlapping, and dialogue skipping / overlapping. There was a point where the vehicle was talking to me and someone was calling over the phone, so there were 4 voices (my character twice) talking at the same time! But nothing prevented me from progressing in any way. The graphics look amazing, but I personally prefer Horizon Zero Dawn (as top tier) because of the nature-based atmosphere. I don't care for much cities, even though the game is literally revolved around one. lol. Driving in first-person at night while it's storming is pretty awesome however. There was a mission where I was allowed to do this as a passenger without worrying about crashing, which was really cool. There a lot of chill moments in general, mainly because character interaction is such a huge focus. But you get a strong connection with the characters this way.
Other than being unable to play it on their respective systems without crashing every 5 minutes (I personally had no problems), the biggest negative I hear is that it's not a fully open-world RPG. This definitely feels like a pseudo open world -- mainly because the driving and layout is very much like GTA. I definitely don't mind all the driving here, as the music is pretty incredible. And I don't know how else they would pull off 20 people calling you at the same time. I also don't mind how it feels like a linear, story-driven game in an open world. For most games I stick primarily with the main story, and only dab into some of the optional stuff. And I'm not bothered by the useless NPC's, lack of detail when you hit someone, and all the rest. So for me it's fine.
Otherwise the story, characters, voice acting are all excellent. Someone is always engaging with you in some form. The side quests aren't that bad either, especially later on. Some are continuous like the main story. I actually care about some of the characters and really want to know what happens with the story. The gameplay feels like GTA meets Fallout 3 meets an FPS game better than both of those (for shooting). The melee combat isn't that fun for me though. And binding dodge and stealth to the same key is a horrible idea. Trying to dodge and shoot a melee-based character (especially a mini-boss) is so frustrating. It seems like every time I try to dodge -- unless I get it absolutely perfect -- I end up in stealth mode while kneeling right by the enemy, only slower than before! WTF. On top of that skipping through dialogue uses the same button! There's times where I'll be crouching while talking to someone because I don't want to skip the dialogue by pressing B... Otherwise, the sniping is a lot of fun; the stealth and quickhack system is pretty cool; there's options in terms of developing the character; and adding Keanu was a huge positive. I heard he requested to be featured often, which is awesome. You can see that for sure.
I'm sure I'm pretty far at this point. Pretty much finished the Panam and Judy side missions and I get the sense that there's not a lot left. I can tell I will be playing this game again, as some of the story didn't make sense and I probably missed some stuff. And it's actually pretty good. At least on the PC it seems fine.
.
