Latest patch says the 8mb save file limit is corrected. However corrupted save files can't be recovered.
So what do I think after 20 hours?
It's a visual spectacle, that's for sure.
Combat overall is kinda meh on hard difficulty. Dudes are bullet spongey and yet you're, starting out with no real gear, dead in just a couple shots. Several encounters I've had to do multiple times just because, right at the very end, one last guy comes up behind you and wastes you. It's tense, don't get me wrong. You have to use cover and just blasting away at a dude who isn't going down immediately is a good way to get flatlined. I just kinda wish it didn't feel like every mook, of every stripe, is some cybered-out wrecking machine that can eat 4 fully charged blasts from a tech shotgun. Like I wish there was a way to distinguish geared and cybered out foes from regular foes in terms of how it feels to fight them. But everyone just ends up being a big bag of hitpoints.
Melee is actually more fun than I thought it was going to be. It's still kinda janky but you can have some decent duels with the AI. You're faster than they are and more maneuverable than they are so it's kinda trivial to stun lock them or stay out of their reach or just dodge all their attacks and respond. But it ended up being better than I thought it was going to be.
Hacking is cool but also a little awkward to use in the middle of combat sometimes. Poured everything so far in to Quick Hack and Breaches. Starting out it's pretty weak but it starts scaling up pretty quickly, once you get a decent cyber deck. I've enjoyed just sitting on a roof top and just dropping Contagion on a group of unsuspecting mooks while being hidden. There's a lot of things to be done with hacking in pretty much every encounter, but most of them amount to "distract enemies." But using cameras and/or turrets if they're present, or making some shit blow up on command you can have some fun with the AI. There are better hacks yet to get, I know.
I think breaches are kinda lame, personally. All this whiz bang tech but ultimately hacking is just a number puzzle. Kinda disappointing. I expected some kind of visualization, some kind of action based hacking. So Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis still remains the most full fledged and featured hacking experience, despite being over a 20 year old game. Maybe some day someone will do a Cyberpunk-genre game where hacking gets the love it truly deserves. That said, overall, I think they nicely captured what hacking should be able to do and the way it should work when it comes to affecting things in the real world, in real time.
In classic Witcher fashion (and really most open world RPG fashion) you have 300 different kinds of consumables that all do the exact same thing, have the same $ value, and weigh nothing. I remember having an inventory absolutely loaded with stuff in the Witcher games that I never used because it was almost useless. Why eat food to replenish health or buff stamina when you naturally regen health before you even get perks or cyberware, and your default stamina pool is so large you can sprint for 4 blocks before it even comes close to running out? (Combat is a different story, I know.) This game's balance is pretty weak IMO, like Fallout levels of "we care just enough to say there's a challenge in the game." Eagerly looking forward to the modding scene.
Performance and stability has been pretty good on high settings. No crashes so far, no real hitches in framerate even while driving.
Driving is complete ass on a keyboard, and I feel like it's best avoided. The slightest touch of the key causes the vehicle to lurch side to side like it has zero stabilization. You less drive than sort of veer side to side while on the road.
As for the city....man it's dense. So much time and effort has gone into making it visually dense as fuck. However, it is pretty empty. When you set aside all the props, all the pedestrians and all the trash to collect, there's not much going on. Reminds me very strongly of The Division which had this absolutely massive city but only a few treasures and points of interest that weren't pre-plotted Ubisoft style encounters.
On that front too....if you're skipping the main quests and only doing side quests sporadically as you work your way around, you'd be tempted to think that groups of 6 to 7 bad guys just hanging out being bad makes up 90% of the game's content. I sorta dislike how NCPD is like 'crime in progress', you roll in, and by the end, the victim is dead alongside their attackers because they just sit there in the middle of the fire fight until they ultimately get smoked. It leaves these bits feeling chaotic and, if not random, just kinda pointless. Like, it doesn't really matter that someone needs help, what matters is there's bad guys to kill and saving someone is just kind of incidental.
Mechanically.....I dunno, the loot system is kinda burdensome. So much loot. So many guns. So much junking and selling. I am however pretty tickled at the sheer variety of clothing and looks. You could probably spend 100+ hours just tracking down all the clothing to make the perfect outfit. This mostly due to the fact that there's no color or style picker that I can tell, what you get is completely random or hard coded at the vendors. So you'll see a coat or something you really like, and you'll see it like once, and then never again. Makes clothes feel like something worth chasing after.
Lastly, the references. So. Many. References. Many are subtle, but many are not. I think after making 3 Witcher games set in a stolid, straight-laced, medieval fantasy genre, the CDPR designers just kinda went apeshit with Cyberpunk. Tons and tons of lurid sexual references or content, toilet humor and tongue-in-cheek references that aren't even trying to be subtle. It's fine, I'm not bent out of shape about it or anything but they're pretty over the top. When I sit back and just think about all the art that went into making CP2077 look like a lived in world, it kinda blows my mind. How many man hours were spent designing 300 knick knacks to be on shelves so places people live and work feel believable? Pretty amazing.
All in all I'm pretty pleased and looking forward to tearing into the rest of the game.