Been playing this game for weeks. I completed it and then started a new game.
The game's story is excellent, but it absolutely does not justify the tedium it makes you endure to experience it.
In a 40 minute sitting, I'd spend the entire thing simply having characters dialogue at me. What's the point of the open world then? Car chases are scripted so that you don't even have to fire a single shot. The enemies will just eventually blow up. 70% of dialogue choices are just for roleplay and don't change a thing or make extremely minor changes. The combat and shootouts are mid.
Act 1 is a chore to get through on replay. There are so many touches they could have added to make it interactive. The Flathead robot mission... why not let us pilot the bot in first-person to do all the tasks, like a stealth minigame? I can think of a few games that let you do something similar. Instead, it is 20 or more steps that are essentially "look at this object and wait."
The best part of the game for me was the middle, where the plot becomes more elaborate, evocative and the relationships with Judy, Panam, Johnny etc develop. But even there the game was navigating me through a seedy open world in order to show me glorified cutscene after cutscene. Then shootouts that were really nothing special.
Witcher 3 was dialogue heavy, nuanced and compelling. It had tedium, but I never felt like the open world was superficial or that the tedium overshadowed the rest of the game. Side tasks like Gwent or contracts were fun and absorbing. The most boring expositional bit was using Witcher sense to explore, but even then at least you were interacting with your surroundings more, not just sitting there being talked at.
Did anyone else feel this way?
I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it's as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase. And many things in the game actually reinforce that idea.
I played the game at launch and the game was absolutely infested with stupid and annoying bugs, so eventually I just skipped all side stuff and just wrapped up the main story, I think that was about half-way through. Back then the open-world most definitely felt like an afterthought.
No events were happening in the world, there were entire parts of the city that were dead and empty. There were even areas blocked off by doors that were "locked" and implied there was something behind it, but some of those places I could just clip through and fall through the world because there was literally nothing behind the door.
There were few things that made it seem like an actual living world, NPCs were just wandering aimlessly, doing nothing. Just making a cool looking area and then dropping a load of copy/paste NPC clones in there doesn't make a good open-world. If you comitted a crime the police would just spawn behind you, wherever you were. While in contrast some of the story areas seemed more detailed and have more "scripted" things happening, which is part of why I think the game wasn't originally open-world.
Gameplay wise it was not that special either, gunplay was okay, melee felt quite unsatisfying, and outside of combat there was practically nothing to do other than just driving around. The choices you make at the beginning of the game don't ever felt like they mattered, like they make it appear it's a huge backstory thing that would play a role throughout the game. Nope, after the first 15 minutes it's never mentioned again. The whole cutscene thing with Jackie after the intro feels like it was supposed to be actual gameplay, but was just cut out and changed to a cutscene to skip time.
Also the skill tree barely mattered, there were even skills like being able to breathe underwater longer, even though there wasn't any underwater content, aside from one Judy mission I believe (which I didn't get because she wasn't accessible as a romance option to my character).
The only saving grace of this game was that parts of the story and characters were somewhat interesting, I liked the concept and style of the game. But it felt like a bad game when it came to actual gameplay. And some characters barely got any time to actually become interesting enough to care about.
I've been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.
That's my take on it too. The story they wanted to tell does not mesh well with an open world game, but since the people loudly wanted something like "RDR 2 but Cyberpunk" they felt obliged to attempt to shoehorn it in.
Completely agree. I think having you play through that part would have made a huge impact on how you connect with Jackie. Maybe they felt it would have pushed the Keanu introduction too deep into the game?
They've added some touches to the open world, but I think it was too fundamentally broken to be easily patched. The new skill tree from 2.0 is actually good though and I think the combat is pretty fun in its current state, even without going to mods.
I was thinking that too. I think during development it might've shifted, since I think Keanu originally wasn't in the game, and they wanted to make him part of the game quite early on.
I would've liked if they had extended the Jackie chapter and moved the Silverhand arc to a later act. It would've meant that people would just be dropped in the game and let them explore the world carelessly before the story kicks up to next gear. But they probably realised that the game wasn't good enough to pull off the open-world part, so they decided to get on with the main story right off the start.
Could be, could be. I think your suggestion would make for a better game with less conflict between what the main story is saying and what the game is presenting in the open world. Having the story emphasize how fast V is dying, only for the player to then fuck around with car races and random merc contracts and whatnot really doesn't work all that well as far as immersion goes.
Jackie's death would have also been much more impactful if we'd have spent all that time with him playing through those six months.