First hours of Cyberpunk 2077
Years ago I have been playing Witcher 3 (and then Witcher 1, Witcher 2) and really liked the game. I spent like 9 months playing it, there was just so much content to discover, and the main story seemed rather long. So when CD Projekt Red finally released their Cyberpunk 2077 game, I thought that I could just buy it without looking at any reviews, I just trust the game studio. And so I bought the game on GOG.
My computer is from 2016 and was a budget machine back then (AMD FX 8320, AMD R9 380). I can play the game on lowest settings in FullHD with 30 frame/s or more, so it is okay. I'm mostly in for the story anyway, And indeed, the story is well put, the city looks very impressive and has many layers to it. I like it very much!
The whole game feels a bit like Witcher 3: There are tons of side quests, you can just talk to people on the streets, there is quick travel and also a mount (though a car and not a horse). The inventory feels the same, there are multiple skill trees and a crafting system. You can consume food and drinks for certain attributes. There are different weapons, lots of clothing, and various bonuses that one can have with them.
Unfortunately there are a few minor bugs in the game, and they take away some of the fun that it could be.
One does a fair share of car driving, just like in GTA games. I am not really fond of car driving to start with, but in this game it is worse than in comparable games like GTA or Saint's Row. The cars drive sluggish, and their handling is rather bad. The most annoying thing for me is that the miniture map does not zoom out with increasing speed. One can only see a turn in the navigation directions right in front of a turn, and then it is too late for the car to react. One either has to drive really slow or make J-turns all the time.
Moving without a car also has some glitches, it feels like a large lag over an internet connection. This isn't possible for a local game, but perhaps it is just my computer which lacks the computing power needed for this game.
Computer enemies like gang members or the police do not move clevery either. They can take cover behind walls, but they don't really chase the player. In GTA or Saint's Row the police would escalate the chase until they had you chased down, but here in Cyberpunk 2077 they just seem to lose interest in you. The gang members even despawn when one runs away. Sometimes they just teleport. When one summons a car, it just appears somewhere and can also drive through roadblocks, just to eventually be near the player.
There seem to be various glitches regarding clipping. For starters, my character has long fingernails, and they protrude out of the gloves when not handling a weapon:
Then there are people who spawn stuck in a car, which doesn't look healthy either. As soon as one enters the car, the person would die and the police would put out a bounty.
But then there are also people stuck inside each other. That also doesn't make sense. It looks like two people spawned in the same place.
The most annoying kind is the one where one cannot pick up loot because something else is stuck over it. In the following image there is a weapon stuck under a fence. There was no way to get it out. As the pickup system is a little flaky all over the place, I usually don't bother long with loot that doesn't want to be picked up.
One instance which almost broke the story was an instance where I had to search a corporate officer for an ID card. He just would not spawn in the elevator fully, and I just tried to fight that glitch. Eventually he spawned dead and I was able to pick up the ID card.
Snipers have been able to shoot me through solid objects. Perhaps that is intentional, but I have the impression that this is a glitch as well. Certainly the laser going through opaque objects must be a bug.
In general the fight mode seems to stick longer than needed. Sometimes I clear a whole area, and I do not get attacked any more. The game still remains in the fight mode and plays the intense music. This gets annoying when I am just looting and get whipped up by that music. And it turns out that the fight music is quite repetitive. Usually in fights I don't notice that, but as they are so drawn out, I happen to get annoyed by the same pattern in the music over and over again. Also in the radio there seems to be a few songs which play over and over, and I am already tired to hear them.
Then during the first time that one visits Fingers, I was in a dialog when a call came in. I did not want to take it, but it was still taken. Then I was in two overlapping dialogs and could not do anything about that. It was hard to follow two incoming steams of audio and subtitles. And right after, it has happened again.
Sometimes there are objects floating around in a way that they are not attached to the people using them. It looks like a messed up rotation matrix. It just looks funny and breaks immersion.
To sum up, it seems to be a really nice game. And I am curious to see where the story will lead to. These little issues should be fixed, and they usually limit my playing time to a bit more than an hour before I tend to do other things. I'll have to see whether they get patched in the next weeks.