With 60+ hours logged and all 5 endings completed I feel I can now be allowed to have opinions about the game now.

It’s . . . certainly something.

Getting it out of the way: Yes Cyberpunk: 2077 is an immensely fucked up game, by every definition. Everything about it’s development was fraught. It feels very rushed. It feels like something that like, back in March, they should have used Covid and the rapidly approaching new consoles to say “Guys, this is going to be a next-gen only launch title. we’re sorry.” But they couldn’t for contractual reasons. So much about the game’s perf complaints were about how garbage it was on a launch xbone or launch PS4, and honestly the game straight up should not have shipped on those platforms. On the Series X it’s fine. On the Xbonx . . Wife hasn’t complained yet.

Outside of performance, it also has serious functional goofiness. Sometimes cars fall out of the sky. Sometimes weapons phase through the floor so you can’t pick them up. Sometimes cameras can’t make up their mind if they’re disabled or not. Most of the time zapping people to death results in them standing up, t-posing, and then falling over. Sometimes you get out of a vehicle, then while you’re getting out of it you get out of it again, and when you regain control you’re stuck in the shadow realm and can’t move. Sometimes you start hacking someone and while you’re hacking them people hack you and when you get out of hacking mode you’ve got a bunch of corrupted crap all over your screen (bug… or immersion???). Sometimes you kill a psychotic person and your reward is a constant loop of grunting and whispering. (I’m pretty sure the last one was a bug, but honestly, there’s so much stuff in this game that I really can’t tell if it’s intentional or not.)

And – like anything CDPR has produced – it’s got a ton of menu-based quality of life crap that just severely lacks polish. I need 30 Purple upgrade mats. Cool. I have a perk that lets me upgrade Blue mats into Purple mats. Cool. I can only craft one at a time. With a 3 second wait. There’s no way to tag items as junk. There’s no way to tag your god-tier murder devices as not-junk.

It has some goofy Witcher-esque highly questionable design choices too. You’ve got 5 core abilities you put points into like basically any RPG, and like 12 sub-skills based on those abilities that upgrade as you use them (sorta TES-style), and then a JILLION perks under those, some with upgrade tiers. And you can’t see all of it on one screen. And the vast majority of those perks are the hottest of garbage. Some of them look tree-ish, but it isn’t clear what their dependencies are. It’s just an absolute mess of a skill system. And of course there’s a level cap, so you can’t max everything out, and the “good” skills require 18 or 20 points into your core ability.

Early game I was trying too hard. I was being too precise. I was getting too frustrated trying to hack and distract and be a complete ghost. But when you’re underleveled that feels horrible. You need to be aggressive. You need to get in there and blow everything up. There’s explosive barrels everywhere for a reason. I ended up in a groove of hacking to scout, hacking to disable key targets, stealth sniping people who survive, then whipping out the smart rifles when things inevitably go sideways. . . and despite all the massive glaring problems with the game it was really fun.

Despite everything that is objectively screwed with the game, and the fact that it should never have launched on the platforms it launched on, and that it really should have been delayed well into 2021. . . it was still somehow a good game. A deeply flawed game, but still spectacular. Story is amazing all the way through. Quest design is wonderful and surprisingly resilient given how broken so much else is about the game. World design and art design are great. Character art is stunning, like, legitimately some of the best character designs and performances I’ve seen in a game. No qualifiers needed.

If they had scrapped the PS4/Xbone versions, focused on next-gen, and done like one more round of patches for quality of life improvements, it’d be a clear cut game-of-the-year. But they didn’t.

I’m going to 100% it, and I’m going to like it all the way through, but it’s hard to recommend. Maybe once they ship the inevitable “Cyberpunk But With All The DLC And NextGen Or Whatever” Edition in late 2021.

2021-01-10 - Addendum⌗

After many further hours I’ve now finished all the achievements, all missions, all everything.

Final thoughts on the state of the game at launch: It’s the best worst game I’ve played in years. There’s so much they did right. There’s also so much they completely screwed up, some in ways that are excusable, some in ways that just aren’t.

Achievement-wise, there are some that are really bad, but I appreciate the approach to how endings were handled, specifically that none were exclusionary.

I think eventually this will be recognized as a masterpiece, but they still have a long way to go.