CyberPunk 2077, New RPG by CD Projekt Red Options

[TheCheshireKhajiit]

So anyone here interested in this game?

[RaderOfTheLostArk]

I'm hearing more and more about how horribly the game runs on lower-end consoles. Obviously PS4 and XBox 1 are going to lag behind PS5 and Xbox Series X (or S or whatever it is), but it sounds like it is practically unplayable. From what I hear, it often drops to 15-20 fps. Hell, people are having trouble with the next-gen and PC versions, unless you are absolutely top-of-the-line in PC specs (which, yeah, that should be the case). If that's the case, that's really inexcusable.

Now, I don't want to be biased and just hone in on negative reviews. I haven't seen many positive reviews yet that really make a good attempt to explain their reasoning, though I haven't really tried seeking them out. I've just done a cursory scan of store pages and sometimes coming across stuff on Reddit. (For all its issues, Reddit can actually have quite a large amount of good and interesting discussion about things like video games.) It's a natural human bias to put more stock into the negative than the positive, but this review from the front page of Cyberpunk's GOG store page really stuck out. [I thought you could embed pictures in here? I can't find the option for it now. Ugh. I'll just copy-paste the text.]

Red text denotes what I added for clarity.

Reviewer: Vapnik

Games: 170
Reviews: 3
2 out of 5 stars (couldn't actually copy-paste the stars)
A disappointment

December 10, 2020 - Verified owner

Cyberpunk 2077 rides on a lot of goodwill from the incredible Witcher 3. Without that goodwill the hype would not be there. Unfortunately, I can't say that it has lived up to the hype.

Everyone has talked the bugs and performance issues to death so I won't repeat them. They're bad, really bad, but probably fixable.

What isn't fixable is the game itself. There's no RPG to this RPG. The story railroads you from one mission to another, the three starting prologues all lead to the same place with the same beats, no matter if you're a Corpo or a Nomad your V will act like the same streetwise edgelord so it doesn't matter. There's no real dialogue choices, you have one dialogue option and some optional chit chat below it.

The characters are all forgettable and it's often unclear why you're supposed to care about the missions. Person X wants item Y but Person Z wants you to screw over Person X etc etc. At no point did I feel any connection to anybody or any sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's all edgy but shallow characterisation. The dialogue is also wooden and gives me no reason to care.

The world is impressive... at first. Then you realise it's all an elaborate shallow stage. You can barely talk to any civilians and they just mindlessly walk straight ahead. No interactions or cool moments like in GTA or RDR. If you shoot your gun dozens of NPCs go into an identical crouching animation forever. The cops can be defeated by standing against a wall as they always spawn behind you. It never feels like you're in a living world, more like a heavily choreographed stage surrounded by lifeless robots.

The gameplay is also unsatisfying. There's a heavy focus on gunplay but none of the guns feel satisfying. Enemies are bullet sponges and you barely react to being shot. Ironically swords break the game by stun locking enemies. Stealth is almost impossible to pull off and hacking is clunky so they're rarely viable options.

It hurts to admit but this is a bad game.

Is this helpful to you? yes no (897 of 1379 users found this helpful)

(Side note: GOG really needs to let you add more characters to your reviews. I've posted four reviews on the site, and 2000 characters just isn't enough to get out everything you want or need to say.)

You can read other GOG reviews here: https://www.gog.com/game/cyberpunk_2077

This sure sounds pretty bad. Seems like they should've cooked it some more, but at this point they probably had no choice due to investors and rabid, capital-G Gamers. Then again, CDPR could've helped themselves out by not hyping the game for 8 damn years.

This post has been edited by RaderOfTheLostArk: Dec 15 2020, 11:14 PM