Probably 4 different people over 8 or w/e years, editting the same spreadsheet in a hurry.
So my thoughts overall after about 40 hours....
It's hard not to compare CP2077 to a game like Fallout or GTA or Assassin's Creed because the patterns are so well worn in these open world games, and they all tend to suffer from the same problem: how do you convincingly fill that much space after the 20th hour, the 30th hour, etc and so on. This game seems to try to blend several different kinds of content.
-At the lowest level you have about half the "criminal activity" events. This is 4 to 7 dudes that are abusing some civilian or standing around being bad. You go in, kick their butts, it's nothing but combat. There's no context to it, no story, none of it even strikes me as purposefully placed. It might be purely randomly generated. This is the equivalent of Assassin's Creed's "You see a patrol of 4 enemy soldiers walking along and decide to fight them because you're bored" setup.
-Above that are the other half of the criminal activity events. These aren't just massed generated, they're hand built and placed. Some guys, in an arrangement somewhere, and 1 to 2 pieces of written text that you may or may not have to find to complete the mission. These are of the form "X talking to Y", always, that gives an incredibly superficial amount of context for why there's a body here, or why they're fucking with the antenna, or why they're by the docks, etc....
-Above that are the actual fixer missions. Most of these also seem hand-designed although in a quick and dirty fashion. Whether you're stealing something or rescuing someone or wiping some people out, there's an actual level and area designed to serve the purpose of that mission. Whether it's an area designed around attempting stealth or a slightly lengthier than normal warehouse with more guys or something. There will either be more "two texts of two people having a casual conversation" or an actual NPC and some dialog. The enemy chatter will sometimes be purpose written for the mission. There is the barest of scripting, usually of the "dudes spawn once you grab the objective" variety.
-Above that are side gigs. They're like the previous except they tend toward being more handcrafted, less "all your context for shooting people in two text notes." There might be some actual real story and characters in these missions. Easy to get them mixed up or mixed in with the more basic fixer missions. These upper tier fixer missions might be your Cyberpsycho hunts, for example. There might be some slightly more elaborate scripting to set the scene for the mission, but not by much.
-The main story missions. I've done the least amount of these now, but it seems like they're where the game saves all its tricks. It's where all the real dialog is. All the fancy animations. All the spectacle. In large part it's one of the rare places your character even talks. The places where it saves its most extreme and interesting set pieces and stuff. The most scripting and scripted events.
Add in all the running around constantly checking shops as you level up, monkeying around roof tops looking for access points, it adds up to a lot of time spent. But it's not hard to get a sense that they've padded things out a bit. Designed 80 pieces of food not because they wanted a bunch of actual variety, they just wanted the appearance of variety. Sorta how you have 3.2 millions different kinds of clothes, but there's no real functional difference between any of them. Which is why a Suede Triple Flex Cardigan can have the same armor value as a Reinforced Trauma Plate. It's the appearance of variety rather than actual variety.
So what I'm starting to feel about the game is this: the art team knew what they were about and cranked out a metric fuck ton of bleeding-edge quality content. The design team however....it feels a lot more amateur and uninspired. CP2077 is like a bigger and more ambitious Witcher, and therefore is sloppier. The weird oversights. The sheer grindiness and, frankly, pointlessness of some systems.
I don't know if it's disingenuous to say CP2077 is "style over substance" since so much of its substance IS style. But armor is clothing is armor really does make the point about what CP2077's priorities are. There are even texts in the game that parody the idea of style being all important.
If I had to liken it most to one of the other big open world games out there, I'd probably choose Assassin's Creed rather than say Fallout/Skyrim. I've never finished the main quest in any Bethesda game. Never even had the slightest compunction to. Because deep down I kinda always felt it'd just be another janky, awkward, taking-itself-too-seriously series of moments. Meanwhile, in Ubisoft games, the little content pellets they leave scattered all over the game, easy to find, easy to check off your list, gets me to finish the main storyline quests because it's like "Well I did all this other shit I might as well finish the actual game too." Bethesda games never get that reaction out of me, probably because I'm less invested in the stories and the delivery and execution of them has often been awkward at best.
With CP2077, it feels more like a Ubisoft game to me, where there's a lot of little shit on a list to be checked off but the main story and the execution of it are enough to make me feel it deserves its due. Just sort of a question of if all the not-main-story content of CP2077 burns out even my ability to play hours of the same repetitive content. A friend came over to see some of it live and after a little while he said "So you basically just run up to some guys standing there and just hack/shoot the shit out of them?" It was hard to disagree with that assessment. When not doing the main story missions, after you've played enough, it all start to blur together into a "find mans, shoot mans, read notes, spend skill points, sell guns, adjust fashion, go to next content pellet" routine.
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Topic: Cyberpunk 2077 by CDProjekt. New Firmware Edition (Read 64778 times)