Overall: CYBERPUNK 2077 is a good concept and a good game, but it needed a bit more quality control work before release. I’m not being facetious, by the way: I know that the console versions were disastrous. But since I bought it for PC (and made sure I had a machine that could run it), I’m pretty much shrugging that off.
I’m not really going to apologize for taking the PC Master Race position here, either. Cyberpunk 2077 still needs a bit more long-term stability on the PC (and the release of whatever DLC was planned) before the modders can get their hands on it. But once the modders do get going this game has tons of places to insert missions, vignettes, and entire campaigns. The long-term playability of this game is going to be in the ability of people to mod it, I think. And there’s a bunch of stuff they can do there.
Strengths: I liked Johnny. He was fun to run around with, made me not feel the lack of companions for most of this game. Good stories generally, fun quest lines, NPCs I liked interacting with. Once you get the hang of motorcycles it’s just fun to drive around Night City at 1 AM, which is totally one of the things I wanted to do in a cyberpunk game. And the game is wicked funny in a lot of places. Listen to the conversations around you.
Complaints: hard to reach level 50 before the endgame, pretty much impossible to get all of the cars (which stay on your damn map until you buy them), the aforementioned unfinished QA work. Quickhacks are extremely powerful at endgame, but you’ll pick six and just use those. I’d like more radiant quests and I hope the DLC raises the level cap to 60. Oh, and there’s got to be a better way to fast-level your Athletics skill besides punching the damn walls.
All in all, upgrade your PC and buy the game. Don’t bother getting it for the console until they fix it – and fix how you console folks handle mods, which is a general industry-wide problem and not one I can advise you on. And keep your hotfixes current!
Agreed on almost every point.
The leveling is odd, but I think is a consequence of the development cycle. On the second playthrough, I did every single radiant and world quest available, and I was level 48. One note here: half the Epistrophy quest on that play through was off limits because of a patch. My guess is they intended some sort of automatic repopulation of the crime related quests so you would be hitting 50 just as you finished the game, but that did not get implemented. This had the result of your build only being ‘finished’ after the game was over and there being no content to actually enjoy it on. I liked the Secret ending and having a completed build was kind of necessary there- although not required. I finished the game the first time, heard about the Secret ending’s difficulty, so I built a character for that difficulty- and then breezed through it on normal difficulty.
In general, I like the leveling system they came up with. I like the systems that actually reward you playing the build and then that unlocks further bonuses, but that also exposes the way that the system seems to be based on having more of the game in order for a build to come to maturity.