Credits rolled, with most real side jobs also done. (I think one meaningful side quest chain might have been unfinished, but I wanted to finish the story tonight). 70 hours on the save file.
That was a wild ride, and a wonderful game. My expectation was a first-person Witcher 3 with a cyberpunk theme, and that was delivered and exceeded. In particular CDPR solved Witcher 3’s problems of the game’s core gameplay loops of combat and witcher-vision being just awful. Honestly I was expecting mediocrity at best for the combat here, but actually the combat consistently felt good and never got old.
It’s the most immersive open world game I’ve seen, maybe even any kind of game. The graphics, the density, the seemingly endless supply of unique incidental dialogue. The main story was great from start to finish, almost all of the proper side jobs were worthwhile.
Then to the bad stuff… Because even within a"Witcher 3 but Cyberpunk" framework rather than “GTA V but RPG”, there’s a lot that didn’t work. It feels petty to complain this much when I liked the game overall, but holy crap is this underbaked.
There are a bunch of systems in the game that might as well not exist, because they’re so insane. (I slotted one single mod in the whole game. It never felt like I’d actually reached a terminal weapon or armor set. And despite that, I had like 5 each of weapon and armor mods at the end of the game. Could have spent all my money from the whole game on buying one legendary mode).
The UI is just subpar pretty much everywhere. It’s hard to understand how it can even be that bad. The map where the filtering options are totally useless. The inventory where you can’t lock items. The phone calls that you’re prompted to answer, can’t decline, and that will auto-answer within a few seconds and probably move your quest marker against your wishes. The batshit insane layout of the perks. Why is the layout radial rather than linear? It serves no purpose, but makes it really hard to do the really common operation of trying to understand what perks are becoming available soon / just became available.
I said early in the thread that I wasn’t really seeing any major bugs, just minor graphical glitches. That early impression did not last. I was restarting the game every few hours since all the ambient sound effects would just randomly stop playing. I must have reloaded a couple of dozen times after the game got stuck in a bad state. (Like some really annoying combat music playing even after you left combat, not being able to interact with items, the relic graphics being left one, etc). The scariest part about riding a motorcycle was that one time in ten crashing the bike would leave you stuck in level geometry. Toward the end the graphics glitches stopped merely being charming jank.
The game’s design seems to almost intentionally try to drive players to interacting with its worst authored content. It is just really hard to find the actual side jobs from the dross of gigs, cyberpsychos, and cars for sale. I probably did more than 20 gigs, and maybe two of them were memorable. None of the cyberpsychos were, since they all followed the same bad formula. “Here’s a fake SMS that’s so boring that you’ll skip over it”. “Find a long-winded and boring shard that you won’t read, but that explains their tragic backstory”. “Neutralize bad guy”. “Find the other shard that gives a second viewpoint, that you also won’t read.”
One of the most striking things to me is how the SMS messages for side jobs are often amazing, while the ones for the filler content are just unreadable trash. It’s very clear that every aspect of the filler content was being done by a B team. Of course, they can’t have the A team do everything, and they needed to fill the open world somehow. But the bad content has to be low key. Something you stumble upon rather than have the game try to force feed you. Like question marks in Witcher 3, that you could have hidden.
The side jobs on the other hand frequently have great writing and interactions with interesting recurring characters. But the game is very slow at opening them up. The worst are the long quest chains with long delays between stages. I understand that the point is for you to go and do something else while the timer runs. But by the time these actually triggered for me, there was nothing else to do. So do a lot of driving to location X and waiting 12 hours, which really broke immersion.
I might need to find a flowchart for how the side job triggering works, but at least the experience of playing was that something went horribly wrong with their quest structuring.
