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 didn't make it far through the game, I quit once I realised how lifeless the open "world" was.
I mean i dont think its the best game ever or anything, but compared to say breath of the wild which is celebrated for its open world for some reason but which is just 99% empty space with a thousand rocks you have to turn over, cyberpunks world is so much more dynamic and alive. There are tons of little hidden quests that you have to stumble upon or be in the right place at the right time. There are tons of little hidden easter eggs, like a dead sniper on one roof with a log entry, and on the roof opposite that a bunch of dead gang members with a corresponding log entry. You really have to search and read everything in cyberpunk to find the little gems, and by the end theres a lot of unnecessary loot and repeated data files, but when you stumble across the reallt interesting hidden bits it makes it all worth it i think. Regardless if you play for more than an hour or two and take the time to explore then its obvious a lot of care went into crafting the world, more than just creating a dumb little puzzle and then copy pasting it 50 times all over the map.
Did they fix having all NPCs react the exact same (time and motions) to gunshots?
I agree with you about BoTW. I played the whole thing. It is actually overrated. Maybe I just needed to soace it out a bit since I played it a ton in college.