Cyberpunk 2077 - Page 23

-Night City is highly detailed and bursting with life. It's immediately grabbing and you want to drive around endlessly soaking in its streets. On beastly PCs you can raise the NPCs on screen and get the full experience of a bustling metropolis.
-Writing and characters are praised extensively for their depth. Cyberpunk is unafraid to handle morbid and mature topics, but also knows how to balance with light and humour.
-Contrary to the promo materials and trailers selling the game as action-packed and explosive, most of the experience didn't resemble that framing. The prologue is plodding, dialogue-driven and takes six hours to reach the title card.
-Sidequests are as good, if not better than the ones in TW3 in terms of writing and gameplay. There's lots of simple ones you find wandering the city, but the good sidequests are carefully crafted and are on par with the main quests. Some have ramifications on the main story.
-Enormous potential for replayability because there's such a wide web of story decisions and plausible ways to play like non-lethal, stealth, hacking or all-out violence.
-Combat is quite good at times. The guns sound powerful and have satisfying physical feedback with recoil and enemies that are inflicted with limb injuries when shot. Melee combat is improved from past previews and is enjoyable enough. Best parts of the combat are when you utilize the full extent of your arsenal and think creatively, rather than as a shooter or action game.
-Do NOT expect Cyberpunk as a shooter on par with games like Doom or CoD. This is still very much an RPG and it will affect how the combat progresses. It is such an RPG that it almost comes at the detriment of the shooting because enemies end up somewhat bulletspongy due to your stats taking precedence over traditional FPS rules like headshots being one hit kills.
-Stealth gameplay is standard and nothing groundbreaking. Some previewers expressed frustration with the AI being either too good at spotting you, or too stupid and unresponsive to your moves. If you knock out guards, they don't wake up apparently.
-Level design presents you with numerous, viable paths to reach your objective.
-You can feasibly play Cyberpunk like you were playing GTA, but the game isn't designed for it. You can rampage in the streets and steal cars, but the civilian AI isn't as responsive as GTA, you need a pretty high body stat to jack vehicles and the police chases are short-lived.
-Most common frame of reference for the game in general was Deus Ex, not GTA, Bethesda RPGs or any FPS.
-Ammo is plentiful and guns use generic ammo types. For example, all pistols share universal ammo despite being very different like a magnum revolver vs. pistol. Don't expect details like certain guns requiring a caliber to use or a lot of resource management.
-Previewers noticed a significant amount of bugs that affect the visuals and gameplay. Nothing gamebreaking, but a noticeable flaw that needs correcting in time.
-Enemy AI during combat is said to range from serviceable (melee enemies charge at you, enemies with guns take cover and shoot) to pretty dumb (unresponsive to attacks, can forget there is an enemy in the room pretty quickly when you're playing stealthily and killed someone). General NPC behaviour isn't going to be the most natural. The previewers stole things right in front of NPCs and jacked vehicles in front of workers, but there was no response.
-Quest log can be overwhelming and inelegant.
-Animations for NPCs are good, but not the finest in the industry like TLoU2.
-Driving is passable because it's got good inertia, weight and speed. Cars don't take realistic levels of damage when crashing or caught underneath another vehicle. It's pretty arcady in that way.
-Loot can require a certain level to equip and use. (I personally don't like this. If it's a weapon with high stats to master, just make it control poorly until you reach an adequate level, not gate players out of it. Feels real dumb being incapable of wielding a certain gun just because it can't separate being a video game from its world)
-Crafting is simple. The game is not trying to innovate on the typical crafting mechanics you see in many games lately.

Overall what most are saying: Cyberpunk won't be re-inventing the wheel, but there's magic is how it combines so many ideas and executes them fairly well in the purpose of a full-fledged, well-written RPG that respects your decisions. It's not trying to have the best combat, the best stealth, the best driving and car physics, the best lifesim elements or the most innovative RPG gameplay, and you shouldn't come in expecting that. The biggest problems mentioned are usually the bugs and enemy AI.