The looting thing is absurd. The enemies you kill have extraordinary sophisticated technology you could pilfer but instead you're picking up ashtrays. The player behaves like a scavenger in a post-apocalypse, not some cool merc in a high-tech dystopia.

31:10 "who decided that picking up useless crap non stop is what people wanted from rpgs" Todd Howard.

Honestly, I thought the life paths were all very different, and would affect the game tremendously, for a long long time. Thats because i chose street kid. The entire game felt like it was built around that life path. It fit perfectly. Imagine my surprise when I started a new character as a nomad. I honestly believe the game was built around street kid for the first few years, then they decided to ads the other two as an afterthought.

Watching this in January 2024 is crazy how many suggestions Neverknowsbest made in this video to make the game better ACTUALLY were implemented in the game. I hope he does a revisit some day.

You're spot on with your fixer mechanic. The game desperately needed a way of organically feeding you missions rather than spamming your inbox.

Fun fact: During the latter half of the 20th century, Japan boasted a powerful economy in the world. This created the theory that Japan might be a candidate for Asia's or the World's next superpower. Of course, this theory's lack of attention to things like population and geography meant that it was erroneous, as Japan's shadow was soon eclipsed by China's. But during those years was when a lot of cultural ideas, such as the cyberpunk theme, flourished. This is why Japan is often so prominent in the setting.

CDPR really fanned the flames of hype to an insane degree. What did they expect? "Yeah you'll be able to do this, and that, as well as aaaallll of those things too!" Of course it's on the consumer to take things a company says with a pinch of salt. But If CDPR hadn't promised the world in the first place then less people would have gone into the game expecting the world.

Finally played it after phantom liberty came out. One of the best gaming experiences I've had.

As someone who's been a gamer since Atari 2600 and Intel 80286, I haven't bought an RPG until at least a year has passed after it's release, and has been my policy since before Oblivion was released. Once patches became a thing, I stopped buying any RPG or Triple A game until at least a year has passed. Now I won't buy such a game until Game of the Year, Complete, Definitive Editions are released. Sorry, I want to play such games once, with all the DLC and other content, and with the least amount of bugs. No hype will persuade me otherwise. This policy is the reason I can look so fondly back at series like STALKER, Elder Scrolls, Witcher, Metro, and Mass Effect.

Get a call from a fixer: "Hey cousin, let's go bowling!"

The saddest thing about Cyberpunk 2077 is that when you play it, you see how HUGE the potential this game had. You can feel how the soul the developers had put into this game is undermined by the modern corporate greed.

This couldve been in my top 5 games of all time if they had more time, I still really loved this game, especially the dark and bitter sweet endings and writing. I swear to god, if Johnny wouldve said "Thank you, V" in the secret ending, I wouldve started crying

I wholeheartedly agree about the loot spam in modern games being annoying. It is always just busywork. I remember playing Gothic 2 where getting a new armor was always a big deal. Getting a leather armor, the first real armor was meaningful because you had to work for it. Either complete a quest for a discount, shell out a lot of money or steal it with the use of a spell. I enjoy such approach much more. On another note, I'd love to see you make a video on Pathologic 2.

When you said “see you in 2021” I didn’t expect you to drop a video literally in the second day of 2021. What a nice surprise

One of the final points is about the ticking bomb incorporated into the game. So so SO many RPG's do this and it infuriates me. If you actually try to 'role play' the role playing game you find that all the interesting sidequests and adventures in the game make absolutely no sense for the protagonist to pursue as THE WORLD IS GOING TO END. Why would you waste time helping a witch to find her cat if the big bad man was hot on your tail and about to detonate a plot nuke? Far too often this leaves me looking for a break in the main quest arc where it seems reasonable that the player would have spare time to do random bits and avoiding the next main quest for ages because I know it will reintroduce the end of days pressure. This is lazy writing and holds games back as a storytelling medium. It bugs me.

CDPR really backed themselves into a corner promising to release on 8th gen hardware. They delayed it so many times that releasing any later would have made a PS4 edition obsolete. The best thing to do would have been to release the PC port, cancel 8th gen ports and focus on getting 9th gen builds out as soon as possible, but they'd already burned through all of their customer's and stockholder's patience. It's nobody's fault but their own, but still, I can't help but feel a little bad for them. You can tell they really wanted to make the greatest game of all time but they bought in to their own hype just a little too much.

I’m surprised it took so long for me to find someone to talk about the biggest problem with the game: feature creep. I mean the writing has been on the wall for years. Hell there were even reports from insiders working on the game who said management were constantly demanding new designs and mechanics even late into production. Feature creep kills games. It’s like the first thing you learn about making games: keep it simple and manage your expectations, things/ideas will be cut at some point.

"Coming when it's ready" Remember that? Cause I sure do.

I'll never understand how folks were surprised about how bad the release of 2077 was, since Witcher 3 had exactly the same problems...

The biggest issue I have with this game is that it’s clearly designed to give you a mind blowing experience in the beginning. The multiple pathways in The Pick Up lead you to believe that every mission will be this way. Just enough time for the positive reviews to come in. It’s not until you start a second playthrough that the cracks begin to show, and the true shallow nature starts to become apparent. This shortsighted approach SEVERELY hampers replay ability because by the time they do fix all the bugs, the propensity for people to care diminishes completely. By the time DLC does release, how excited will anyone be to play it?

I can literally change my eyeballs but can’t get a haircut. There’s some fundamental stuff cut out of this game if we’re talking immersion hahaha It’s a true shame. There’s an intangible hook that has sunk into me with this game, but I feel disappointment around every turn when faced with frequent cut content or scaled back content.

People are not taking issues with The Witcher3 not being a full rpg but more of an action game, because they role play as a set character, predefined in his behavior, with no intention on customizing him like a crpg, you act like Geralt would act, and take decision that Geralt as his own character would. On the other hand, cyberpunk features a first-person character that's supposed to merge the player in the character they are playing, fully customizable, with lifepaths and so on, yet there are no outcomes for your choices and skill checks in dialogues that does not change anything in the game. Yet you are supposed to role a character, that you made, with a predetermined voice, tone and behavior, in a story of predetermined outcomes for the vast majority of the time. So even if the witcher 3 is less an rpg than cyberpunk, the latter should have been much more rpg by itself. The witcher is a game based on a book, with notorious characters, with a much heavier narrative claim, while cyberpunk is a game based on a tabletop rpg; here's the issue, in the witcher 3 noone expected to play a fully customizable story, while in cyberpunk the said times and times that would be the case, being able to play a multibranching story as close as possible to the original concept of the original papaer game. They even aried the creator of the paper game, resulting in a mass disappointment when the game came out to be far from what they promised, a much more railed story with less choice than fallout 4, and that's all to say. Another point to make is, when you say people should not critizes cyberpunk to be a shallow rpg, but to find a true argument. All you said to that point was that cyberpunk was more of an rog than the witcher3, without spending a word about how good or valid of an rpg tw3 is. Comparing a bad rpg to a slightly better rpg, doesn't make the latter a good rpg by its own. Cyberpunk is a shallow rpg,no matter how every other game are shallow rpg too. The fact that there are not good rpg out there, doesn't magically make cyberpunk a good rpg. Comparing cyberpunk to a worst rpg, doesn't justify cyberpunk to be a bad rpg. With this logic, people should not point out how fallout 4 was a bad rpg, just because assassin's creed origin exhist, or just because dragon age inquisition was a worst rpg, or vice-versa. And honestly, your balme on the people wnating everything was so cheap. Strawman after strawman, going on saying everybody was expecting this game to be perfect in every way and having every element known to man. That was a low point on your video. The reality, people expected exacthly what the 2018 preview told them the game would be. A deep,true rpg, with a multibranching story, a fully customizable character to the point that even your dick was in the customization. Turns out that was the most customizable thing out there.

My issue with johnny is that I didn't want him to steal the show from my characters story, yeah he does take up a lot of screen time and it's really well done, I personally was just hoping for an rpg around my character not around johnny.

And yes, in a game about cybernetics, why add stats to t shirts?

This is a good video, but the whole "RPG or not" point felt like a huge strawman argument. Nobody's arguing that Witcher 3 is a better RPG, the general consensus on the internet is that it's pretty bad at allowing you to roleplay because Geralt is a pre-written character. You're not playing a Witcher you created, you're playing THE Witcher. So you need to be limited to shallow role playing options because only choices Geralt himself would consider can be allowed. Cyberpunk is based on a tabletop game and V is a player-created character, so naturally people expected to be able to mold them as they please. The only aspect that's forced on you is your name, and that's because NPCs need to be able to address you in dialogue. You bring up combat, but that's the shallowest level on which you could role play. "Am I going to cut this guy in half with my katana from stealth?" or "Am I going to blow this guy's head off with my huge gun?" is not really a deep choice, and while it certainly increases replayability, it's not something that makes a game a good RPG. It's about shaping your character the way you want them to be as a person, making meaningful decisions based on their personality and molding them into your own. Cyberpunk has little to none of that. Your entire point centers on the fact that no matter what CDPR promised, we should've looked at their previous games and concluded that Cyberpunk won't be a good RPG solely based on that. And that it shouldn't be compared to other RPGs, only the Witcher, to determine whether it actually is an RPG. I'm sorry, but that's such a ridiculous statement to make.

Love the video, just chipping my two cents lol I don't really agree with giving cyberpunk the point over the witcher for having lifepaths, given the fact that while the witcher didn't have them at all, the opening story was all the better despite that. Cyberpunks lifepaths are incredibly shallow choices that all lead to the same prologue after ten minutes and would've been better replaced with one specific, more fleshed-out prologue and character background

I wasn't aware that people considered The Witcher 2 & 3 RPGs. But I think the reason people enjoy the narrative choice in those (and games like Mass Effect) and complain about the lack of roleplaying in games like Cyberpunk 2077 (and DA Inquisition) is that they promise meaningful expressions of character, which they don't deliver. The Witcher and Mass Effect don't pretend. I agree that "RPG" is the wrong term here but I think what these people are looking for is narrative freedom, not mechanical build variety. You can decouple these things and on the one hand get games like Pyre and The Walking Dead and on the other get linear immersive sims (like Dark Messiah).

Its fascinating watching this now that 2.0/PL is out. Proves he was right. Great video.

Can we talk about how invasive the main story feels in comparison to side content? It feels like two different teams designed them. And if your past the prologue it feels really uncomfortable tearing yourself away from the campaign to grind, get money, and buy vehicles. Considering your dying then all of this should be meaningless.

The armor attributes got my character lookin like lady Gaga half the time

The difference between the lootsystem in Fallout 4 and Cyberpunk is, that you can or more, even have to use that junk to dismantle it and upgrade ur wepaons or ur base with those raw materials. On the other hand the Clutter and the amount of items in Skyrim and Fallout are also there to give u a feel of a realistic world. Cause those items are part of the interior of a house, of a NPC's home, those items are part of the world They have purpose, a meaning in that world. They make sense! Also those NPCs react allergic if you just pick up their stuff , they call for guards or attack you. All that is missing in Cyberpunk, that junk has no meaning no purpose, besides sitting there for the player to steal it / pick it up. You can sell it, but not use it.

We should never have trusted a company that calls itself "Seedy Project". /s

45:31 I think most people just wanted the game to be Deus Ex meets Grand Theft Auto.

I also think the verbiage pushed by CDPR is outright gross. “We should have paid more attention to last gen consoles” That’s horseshit. This game was supposed to release on 3 different dates before new console gen even started. What would they have blamed it on then?

In a game-world set during a time where constant, instantaneous body-modifications are the societal and economical norm which has continuously blurred the lines between man, machine, gender, individuality, and even sexuality (all of which are exploited by greedy, money-hungry corporations for profits and personal gain)...my character can’t even get a haircut.

Rewatching this on Christmas Day 2022, as Christmas time always reminds me of Cyberpunk. With some time between my last watch (nearly 2 years), what stands out to me is the thing that CDPR did accidentally without meaning to, is create the first video game that feels exactly like the modern day experience. Constant spam calls with jobs you don't want from people you don't know telling you about things that don't matter, the endless accumulation of a never-ending and constantly more abstract avalanche of loot, the daily overwhelm of information that seems very important in the moment but is completely forgotten in the next, the gamification of every aspect of human life. They didn't mean to do it, but in their failure they gave us the perfect mirror of the society we ACTUALLY live in. Because our culture schizophrenically suppresses the reality of our lives, of course it was alienating to see it and experience it in the medium of video games, which is "supposed" to be smooth and frictionless. Of course we got what we asked for (with all the issues and glitches that are features of modern society, not bugs) and freaked the fuck out about it.

They should have slapped Early Access on it, blamed corona and everything would have been fine. Should have been like "Hey it's not done, but we know you're sick of waiting so here's EA, it's mostly done" on the yellow screen of death and that would have been it.

Man I just really wanted to play the montage, all those looked like fun started missions to get me hooked on Jackie and Tbug.

One thing about W3 and CP combat: enemy variety. I know making them varied in CP is harder as you just cannot come up with different monsters. Still, Witcher was much more creative

The problem with comparing Cyberpunk and The Witcher 3 in how they execute on being an rpg, is that neither of the games ARE rpgs at all. They are both uni-genre games with rpg elements. It's like comparing whether a triangle or a square is a better circle.

40:30 You CAN customize your mount in Witcher 3. Also you can horse race, fistfight, play gwent etc. The criticism on this point is about the lack of noncombat side activities in Cyberpunk, don't misrepresent it.

I can't agree more with "useless loot" bit

It was popular to hate on Cyberpunk and to dunk on anyone who enjoyed it. It’s changed a lot now that bugs have been patched and people can see how good the actual game is but it’s a shame the things that genuinely needed calling out got drowned out in a torrent of impotent rage

Its funny that you would say the game is an RPG based on the worst arguments you could find against it and comparing it to the Witcher series, which is not an RPG series.

There's a notion in critiquing art that something can be greater than the sum of its parts, this is how most people view the Witcher 3. Most people I've seen acknowledge the floaty and samey combat, and the shallow rpg elements, however, the story massively outshines these problems to such an extent that people call it the best game ever made. And as for Cyberpunk, many feel that due to how much is broken, been removed, and straight up not developed such as physics and ai that we're used to seeing for years in open world games, the negative far outweight any incremental improvements over the Witcher 3.

“Never knew consoles could crash games” Laughs in fallout🤣

It's not just the bugs.. But the lies

Thank you for your up for being fair. I was starting to believe I'd never find a video discussing the game in the way you did. Your closing comments on hype and hate are spot on. I urge anyone who is interested, setting aside the rocky launch, the overselling, the failed promises, to just play this and decide for yourself. It is not perfect, but I can say that, with the recent patches for PC players, the game is nothing close to how it launched in terms of problems. Issues are still there, but I can back what NeverKnowsBest said about experiencing minimal game breaking problems, nothing that reloading a quick save could not fix. For all the horror stories out there I was astounded how little my immersion was broken; the game just plain ran well on my PC (console is still a different story, I know). I just finished the game and, while I understand everyone's tastes are different, this is one of my top 5 favorite experiences in gaming. Had I listened to the hype and the reviews, I do believe that would have been somewhat ruined for me. Some standout things for me personally: the immersive sound design, the sense of scale you feel walking the city streets, the beauty of this games art design and the way they nailed the asthetic, character facial animation that stands as some of the best I've seen in gaming, the soundtrack (Refused!), the way the world of the CP2020 tabletop RPG comes to life in Night City, companion quests that I still can't stop thinking about, and even the combat (once you get past the lower levels of your character's progression) kept me entertained with trying out new quickhacks and gun combos (loved hacking enemies to have them go cyberpyscho as a distraction tactic while I stealthed my way around).

I've lost count of how many times Regina Jones has called me right before a gun fight with any hostiles lmao

I agree with the statement that there hasn't realy been a deep AAA rpg in quite a while. At least a western style one. We need more games like Dragon Age: Origins and KOTOR 2. Oh well, we still have the crpg revival if we want some deep rpg experiences.

I do think part of the disappointment in this game is CD project reds marketing. They made it sound like it would be the most interactive, most customizable, most choose your own adventure game in history. At least that was the impression I got, and this game is not that.

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the few games where it feels like I've played a totally different game compared to many people that mention it. I had almost no bugs (a few cases of things or people floating around or having a weird animation, but nothing else), no problems with performance and had a very good time playing it. I've played through it two times and enjoyed both times a lot. Definitely one of my top games, and the only real thing I can say against it is that the replay value isn't super high, but that's not really something I expected so I can't really say I'm disappointed in that either.

I agree with a lot of this but before you continue to blame consumers and continue down this thought path of "You should have known" Go back and watch the 2018 48 minute gameplay demo and the things they specifically said the game would be, then you can make a follow up video where you drop this whole "You should have known" Claptrap. To quantify, i enjoyed this game but i want to play the vision of this from 2018 rather than what we got. I do agree a lot of the backlash towards CP2077 has been really hyperbolic but CDPR never rescinded any promises nor did they make any attempt whatsoever to ground people's expectations after multiple delays and obvious goals they were unable to hit based on the version of the game they released.

Got what was advertised, your look at Cyberpunk is refreshingly open minded. I found it exceptionally well organized, especially on your metrics for comparing it to the Witcher 3. You've really cut through the popular narrative that's seemed to have snowballed across the internet, wildly distorting perspectives of what the experience actually is and where its successes and failures actually lie. Going off personal experience here, thank you for taking the immense amount of time that this video surely required to produce! +sub!

Channels that plaster their think pieces with "honest" and "open-minded" stink to high hell of the opposite.

The perpetual "somehow" tangent really was the weakest point in this essay, since all of the things you complained about were in fact explained. Soul killer did not in fact extract anyone's soul, it made a partial copy of someone's consciousness. You survive the bullet to the brain exactly *because* of the chip, which is able to direct the reconstruction of brain matter, but also kicks off the gradual taking over by Johnny's brain. I appreciate that you acknowledged you may have become a bit numb to these explanations, but they're given to you straight and in the main story missions, so it's a bit lame to then raise this as a valid critique

As much as I respect your work and accept that this is merely your opinion of the game, it really bothered me how you spent a long time comparing the game to The Witcher 3, and using these as arguments as to why the game succeeds in certain aspects, instead of merely explaining why you feel the game succeeded in said elements. To me, Cyberpunk 2077 has the gameplay of Far Cry 3-5 and the RPG elements of Fallout 4. Sure, you can role-play a more player defined character and have plenty of choice, but the depth of said choice both gameplay and story wise is that of a puddle. Do you want to stealth or go loud? Do you want to be good/selfless or bad/selfish? Binary choices that games like Far Cry 3-5 and Fallout 4 suffer from. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to be a wide and open RPG where you had bucketloads of choice. Instead, it lets you play the story of a well-written, well-established and beloved character, allowing you to guide him and view the world through his eyes. In other words, you role-play as Geralt of Rivia. This to me is the far more engaging style of RPG, as opposed to the "as wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle" style of RPG i.e Fallout 4. Rather than spending time seemingly playing defense and, for some reason (seemingly) spending time arguing why The Witcher 3 isn't a good RPG and Cyberpunk is, it'd be more enjoyable to see you argue the game's merits on its own.

Overall, this is a good video, but some of the arguments you present are genuinely flawed. The RPG segment is an entirely quantitative argument. You count the number of mechanics without looking at how they work. Fundamentally, what Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk are not the same. As you said, Geralt is a set character. V was purported by the developers themselves to be YOU. V is NOT you. Nor is he an interesting enough character no matter what life path you choose. Geralt being Geralt, a Witcher, informed the way the world reacted to him. The world never reacts to V, no one gives a fuck about him, the world does not react to your decisions either. The consequences to quest largely come from text messages or phone calls, nothing is changed about the observable world. In Witcher 3, you felt like Geralt. In Cyberpunk you feel like a floating camera that gets talked to. The attribute points you put into V largely don't shape who he is, it unlocks more flavor text. Again, this is what CDPR purported. Also to say "people should have just expected Witcher 3" shows complete ignorance because every game in the series is COMPLETELY different from each other. Also no, Keanu did a horrible job as Johnny. Johnny isn't a booked up, out of touch old man. He is an angry, deeply troubled man. He flies off the handle and makes decision without thinking. Keanu is completely flat in any scene that requires emotion. I will admit he's alright in the quieter, more introspective scenes, but largely he is ineffective in the role. It's not a bad game, it's a solid 7/10, but I have never played a game that seems to be so at odds with itself. The biggest lie they told was that the game would only release when it was ready and it wasn't. Stop saying that people shouldn't have expected the game would be GTA. The games open world lacks basic features that have been done by games made by development teams far less numerous and well funded. The only thing people expected was what CDPR showed, they didn't have to show this game in 2018. They didn't have to release it this year. Stop excusing this multi-billion dollar, over 1000 employee company for their failings.

I didn't have unrealistic expectations. I didn't want a game to end all games. I wanted a story rich game that gets me invested in its world. Basically the Witcher 3 in a Cyberpunk setting. A likable main character in a world with memorable characters and a cool story. All of that with UNBROKEN gameplay.

It's interesting. I was hyped for the game since 2018 when they showed off the gameplay. I learned more about CD Projekt Red through Cyberpunk. I began to become familiar with their works on The Witcher series, and their reputation. I wanted Cyberpunk 2077 because of their setting, story, and characters that seems interesting to me. I asked for it on my birthday, it was pre-ordered, and delivered to my house around the release date. When I played it on the PS4, I didn't expect the game crashing, bugs, glitches, and all sort of problems. That game was my first experience with CD Projekt Red. Yet, I tempered my expectation throughout my playthrough. I found that I enjoyed the characters, the story, the gunplay, some part of the RPG element, and the exploration. There are problems, no doubt, but I've realized that my expectation were too high. So, I took a step back and look at the game for what it is. Comparing Cyberpunk 2077 to The Witcher 3 is a smart move. You're comparing two games that are made by the same studio and that gives room to judge Cyberpunk 2077 based on CDPR previous work rather than what has been made by an entirely different game companies. Don't get me wrong, Cyberpunk 2077 is guilty in some part of its downfall, but I think the game were lit on fire on release and people continue to pour gasoline on it without having to be more critical. I think your video have managed to be as objective as you can make it and tried to give a critique that it needs. Nothing too unrealistic, but not too lenient. I very much enjoyed your video and I personally agree with points that you have made in the video, even if some of them had not occurred to me.

You can customize Roach in Witcher 3. You can give him various saddlebags, saddles, blinders and trophies.

The conclusion of the comments on the game as a role-playing game seems bizarre and pretty confused imho. It's unclear who the indignation over people hypocritically lauding Witcher 3 but not Cyberpunk is aimed at. Is it the general audience, mainstream gamers, or is it the rpg audience, the people more likely to complain about the game not being a deep and reactive rpg? The comments are especially weird because the decision to weigh the rpg merits solely on a comparison to Witcher 3 is something solely thought up and presented by this video. It doesn't point to any widespread talking point that Cyberpunk is a bad rpg because it's inferior to Witcher 3 in that aspect. The video gets pretty close to making a good point, with it's comparisons to games like Dragon Age Origins and Fallout New Vegas, or the visual examples of Pillars of Eternity 1 and Disco Elysium. But then it seems to discount the idea of talking about those games because they aren't AAA or because they weren't made by CD Projekt. This is frankly a ridiculous notion, since it demands one only treat Cyberpunk in isolation, that it be judged as an rpg in a vacuum. Seemingly deciding that nobody who dislikes the game because of the general state of the gaming mainstream and disappearance of deeper rpg game design is to be taken seriously, and that such people are being unfair to the game they bought wanting a role-playing experience. Like, saying "if you didn't like this direction of AAA games or CD Projekt why didn't you speak out when Witcher 2 came out, huh?" is such a strange complaint to level against audience reception. The gaming playerbase is hugely different in 2020 compared to in 2016, let alone in 2011. Treating the issue as though it were individual people who are not being consistent, when it is millions of people talking at once, most of whom weren't even present to speak when those earlier games came out, is the kind of reaction you'd expect from the developers of Cyberpunk as like a kneejerk defensiveness. It doesn't really work at all at defending the game in a broader context, just if you narrow your view to only look at the CD Projekt catalogue. I think it's also worth bringing up that Cyberpunk is a way bigger product than Witcher 2, which makes it a much better target for this type of criticism than the latter, if you ask me. The whole aim of the type of changes later Witcher games made was to expand the audience away from the rpg niche. If the response of the wider masses now match the kinds of complaints made by rpg purists, I would think that represents a very positive development, one that can actually change the status of role-playing games in the AAA space. This seems like a way better reaction than the kind of defeatist tone shown here, with the part of the video that dismisses deeper AAA rpgs as something that's dead and therefor apparently not worth discussing.

Looting in the real world! Show up to an interview: Interviewer: Nice to meet you. Why don't you sit down and we can get this interview underw.......? Me: (Walks right passed interviewer, into their office and start pulling out drawers in their desk and dumping them into a huge duffel bag) Interviewer: Sir? SIR! SIR! What are you doing?! Me: (Ignores them and walks out the door with all of their shit in my bag)

Just finished this on ps5 and purposefully avoided it since release, was a great experience start to finish and loved the game. If the game came out in its current state on release I think it would have been a solid 8/10 for most critics and people. No it didn't live up to hype, nothing could, it is a very good game though. And thr city itself deserves awards for its design.

people are mad not because it wasn't "the perfect rpg," people are mad because of the false advertising. you can't blame people for expecting what was advertised. that's counterproductive, don't take it on the consumers, don't take it on the devs, take it on the marketing team, take it on the management team, the execs. it's not the studio's fault, it's the COMPANY's fault.

Worst thing about CP2077 isn't even the bugs, it's how average the game actually is.

Go back and play it again 3 years later. It's so much better.

It’s been almost 3 years, 2.0 and phantom liberty are about to drop. Not to mention the handful of big patches between release and now. I know im not the only one who wants to see a second look

I completely understand how you feel about Cyberpunk and Witcher, but to explain personally why The Witcher 3 “is more of an RPG” for me than Cyberpunk is because I take the role-playing part too literally. In Witcher 3 I personally took the role of Geralt and the game gave me the options of how to build Geralt as a person through various dialogue. Would Geralt rather save an inslaved wife of a Baron by killing an evil spirit or letting an evil spirit save innocent children kidnapped by the witches, but doom the life of Baron’s wife. It made me consider how much my actions could change not just the life of Geralt, but the lives of everyone around him. As for Cyberpunk, I’m glad it gives you various options for gameplay approach that you’re personally comfortable with, but I cannot role-play as V because I can’t change V, most of the time. For my first playthrough, I picked up a Corpo V and tried to fit myself into that role into his life. Tried to be a harsh ex-Corpo, being a harsh serious person, but still realizing the freedom he has now over the enslavement of corporations he experienced. But I never felt as a Corpo V, even if I truly wanted to. And through other playthrough of the games, I never felt like a Nomad or Street Kid V as well, because V doesn’t really change that much. During most of Act 2, V remains a certain person at all times. And even if there were opportunities for V to change the outcomes of certain stories, it rarely happens. So, to be short, in Cyberunk I played as V, but in the Witcher 3 I became my own Geralt.

I'm confused why your comparing this to the Witcher. Expectations were driven by what was said, promised and shown by CDPR throughout development, not what we should have expected based on The Witcher. You can't sugar coat the lifepaths being worthless because there's nothing like it in the witcher, when they directly promise that they'll play a big role, and showed them off specifically as a feature. If they promised a procedural open world, and then didn't produce one, you can't excuse that by saying that the Witcher didn't have one so why expect any different

The thing is not that it isn't cyberpunk enough, it's not blade runner enough.

I often find myself having relatively minor bug experiences compared to the way the internet describes them. So I felt this. I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077, and felt most peoples stories felt exagerated, and based on the gamer group I'm friends with, many of them go out of their way to TRY to cause bugs which just isn't how I play the game.

The answer to the RPG critisism is just that the WItcher is barely an RPG either. I'd describer both as action games with light role playing game elements. But further than that the key thing for any RPG to have, imo, is choices and conseuqences that you can use to role play your charachters personality and charachter. The Wither 3 was fairly limited in that regard but I felt it gave me a certain amount of leeway as to what my Geralt was like as a person and what he thought about the different charachters and factions in his world and he could strongly influence their outcomes. This is pretty lacking in cyberpunk. V's personality is basically set in stone. You'd have thought with V not being an already established literary charachter there would be much more room to decide what sort of person they are and what they think about the world around them but there is actually slightly less! With that being the case it doesn't then magically beocme more of an RPG because it lets you do a stealth playthrough.

So my reasoning why this feels like a shallow RPG compared to the witcher, even though cyberpunk has more RPG depth is because in the Witcher, you are role playing as Geralt. You make the choices Geralt would make. You don't care about Ciri because of what she means to you, you care about Ciri because of what she means to Geralt. In Cyberpunk, you are roleplaying "you". Its first person, you create your character, you are referred to as V and not by a name. This sets a different RPG perspective and thus, makes the experience feel shallow. Now that we play as ourselves, we want to make more choices. Our choices. Our expectations and meaning of RPG has been shifted by CDPR with these development choices, and now we expect something different.

"Most people's basis of what is an rpg comes down to whether they like the game" You hit the nail on the head here. I love the witcher 3 but the internet was so obsessed with it to the point where its a taboo to criticize it, Cyberpunk came out as a result and many of the witcher 3's problems leaked into it and its really frustrating that people are refusing to admit it especially with the undeniable comparisons you made.

"I mean, we're long past the age where big budget games come bug free, right out of the box" Do you really think that's an acceptable claim to make? Apart from it not being true (almost every Switch exclusive is as polished on day 1 as it's ever going to get, and while acceptable PC releases are the minority, it doesn't mean they don't exist) it's also not a reasonable standard we should be settling for.

I don’t buy the argument that people don’t know what they want. In fact, I think everyone knows exactly what they want from this game. Just look at the 2018 “gameplay trailer”. That was what started the hype and that is what people wanted... People expect missions designs, world interactions, decision making to be on that standard, but at the end it was just a tech demo and the rest of the game never reaches the same height. I think it is reasonable people felt being cheated.

The only use-case where picking up every single loot is not a chore is the one where loot is scarce and essential for survival

To be fair my man, I think expecting a game that was announced back when I was in Sophmore year of High school to be comparable in quality to Rockstar titles, with all the features they set out to achieve, is PRETTY fucking fair.

People who are talking about the lack of consequences to the choices they made are simply unaware of the fact that this game is actually trying to tell the story that no matter what you do you cannot change a damn thing, just like you cannot save your body, Jhonny couldn't destroy Arasaka, someone always ends up dying if you choose to go down in a blaze of glory. THIS GAME IS A MASTERPIECE

I think you missed the entire point of why the public backlash was so much. We have an entire list of things that CD told us was going to be in the game, and that's why we bought it. And we got next to none of what they sold us. We got Far Cry in the future, we didn't want that. To lie to consumers and their customers is just plan theft.

When advertised- "ground breaking rpg with densely populated advance AI. And choices that make massive impacts on the world!" Actual game- Basic looter shooter with a few rpg and dialogue choices that makes litter impact to anything. It has some of the worst AI seen in a game recently. And the world is dead with little life.

Women don't ruin video games...feminists do...

Regarding your question about why some people consider CP2077 a shallow RPG, I think it comes down to expectation. In Witcher you play a predefined character, that lowers the expectations about choices. V is pretty much a blank slate, which you define. But the choices don't really impact the story as much as people expected.

About the shallow RPG complaints, multiple times during the several years of development, it was promised that it would be a deep RPG like the classisc ones but with a scope and budget of a AAA modern game. the game director said its main inspirations were bloodlines an deus ex. Is it an unrealistc claim to do or believe? yes. But the hype was so massive and trust on CD project was so high that it is understandable to at least expect half of what was promissed.

43:44 I kinda agree, but I also don't think that the expectations were that unreasonable. I mean you could say the same about the Witcher 3: "It wanted to be everything: an rpg, fighting game, a card game, a detailed world, branching story lines, horse racing, crafting, romancing, etc" Witcher pulled those things off. All people wanted was for CDPR to take what they've learned and expend on the RPG mechanics a bit more as the logical next step. I think that if they hadn't switched genres so radically (i.e. from fantasy 3rd person swordfighting to futuristic 1st person shooting) they could have easily managed to add things like character creation, customisable houses, stealth, etc. to make it an rpg almost everyone would be satified with. The real issue seems to be the fact that they basically had to begin from scratch with this game. Virtually no assets or animations from the witcher could be reused due to the genre switch and they had no experience with shooting or driving. They should've either stayed with the witcher franchise or given themselves time to transition to a new genre. I think that with just a little bit more time, CDPR could have delivered on all of the "unrealistic" promises, because in a lot of ways, they got pretty close of pulling it off.

Strange looking at old videos of improved games, I wonder if Starfield will be the same. I'll edit this comment in 3 years.

It is not an RPG because 90% of the gameplay is fighting, and i dont compare it to the Witcher as i dont like that game at all either. An RPG should give you different approches to situations, different ways to solve a problem, but if a game only gives you different opportunities in how to butcher down enemies is not an RPG in my eyes. An RPG should have many more aspects in gameplay than the fighting sequences, and you could argue that there are some parts where you have to find stuff through BD's or however were they called, but they were extremely hand-holding and boring, almost like in a walking simulator. Compare this to other RPG's where you have a ton of different solutions, and different approaches, where you can turn a peaceful conversation into a bloody mess, you can solve stuff without fighting and where you dont have to kill thousands of enemies just because the game cant think of gameplay outsie of murdering people. No, Cyberpunk 2077 is a looter-shooter/immersive sim-ish something, or the mixture of them both. Also, fuck the people who always cry about graphics an presentation. We had the technology to create any kind of games like 7-10 years ago, but its somehow never enough for people. Style, and creativity all the way over pristine graphics with boring, soulless games.

nothing is dynamic in this game, nothing reacts to the players actions, everything is scripted and underdeveloped.

I feel like trying to assess which game has "better" rpg mechanics by simply quantifying how many different skills/attributes/perks etc. are available is a deeply flawed line of reasoning. Having played both, Cyberpunk might have a higher number of arbitrary points to be spent, but that system doesn't translate to more satisfying skill progression. On a similar note, there might be a higher quantity of ways to approach combat encounters in Cyberpunk, but that is not the same as saying combat encounters in Cyberpunk are better designed or more satisfying.

"Face it. Deep AAA RPG's are dead. They have been for years, and it's likely audiences obsession with graphics and level of presentation that was the very thing that killed them." Damn . . . those words hit home like a ton of bricks. Watching your videos on the Elder Scrolls series (since I never played any of them) is what really made it clear to me just how much the tech race has warped the design choices at AAA games studios.

I wish they gave you the chance/forced you to use your eddies from the side content to extend the ticking-time bomb the main story constantly reminds you is in your head. That way you'd reconcile both story tracks and provide an extrinsic motivation to do the open-world fluff.

I disagree with the way you break down what a better RPG is. You mostly seem to quantify the number of build options to determine what is more of an RPG but to me this seems like a shallow way of defining it. An RPG is a role playing game, that is to say you play a role. I think that many people view Witcher 3 as a better RPG is because they feel that it is easier to role play as Geralt more so than V. With Geralt you are given a set character who you can visually modify and see in third person, you can make meaningful decisions as Geralt that have an impact on the world around you. Decisions you make as Geralt frequently have consequences later on in the narrative. The ending of Witcher 3 is heavily dependent on decisions you made previously in the story. In Cyberpunk you are given V, a shallow pseudo-"build your own character". It is difficult to role play as V because no matter which origin story or dialogue choices you make you are still the same predetermined character on the same predetermined path. The presence of pointless dialogue options makes the game feel like its trying to fake a dynamic role playing story. The world does not react to anything you do or change with any of the decisions you make. In conversations you can almost always say whatever you want with little to no impact on the story outside of "yes" and "no" responses. Aside from the romance option, every ending for cyberpunk boils down to a screen where you choose which ending quest you want to play, just like the life path options in the prologue. I think you are placing just a bit too much emphasis on build variety rather than the role you play in the story. For me at least, the role playing elements of the story are what makes this a poorer RPG game than the Witcher 3. It feels like a guided story experience where I get to choose the prologue and ending sequence and a few pieces of audio in between whereas the Witcher felt like a world that I impacted while playing the role of Geralt.

Concerning the "is it an RPG" question: As any look on a witcher wiki will prove, there is significantly more branching - i.e. player agency - in the story of TW3. CP77 has it in the maelstrom flathead mission - which served excessively for PR purposes - but then simply failed to follow up on it. In fact, this pattern - showing something interesting which then turns out to be the only instance of said highly advertised aspect - seems rather common with CP77, and sours the experience noticeably. It's almost always "just barely good enough", and very seldomly excellent. But just barely good enough is not the stuff memorable games are made out of... Speaking of which: I find it unfathomable how in 5 years, the UI - which was never considered a strong point of TW3 - doesn't seem to have evolved at all. So now we got this cumbersome looter shooter mechanic compounded by this clunky inventory management (fully repopulating upon every transaction while warping positions) to keep us "busy" for hours. Quality gameplay? Don't get me wrong: The artistic assets in this game are golden, I can absolutely see that. It just makes me mad that they're (over)burdened and ultimately buried by this uninspired and second-rate game design.

I really don't care which is the better RPG. I just care which one is the better game. The Witcher 3 is on a whole other level than Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is a mess, whereas the Witcher 3 is the best game I've ever played in my life.

I wish Cyberpunk gets a redemption arc like with what happened with the redemption of No Man's Sky.

Rpg doesn't mean anything anymore. A genre where you can include Baldur's Gate, Genshin Impact and Borderlands is useless to say the least. I think the problem is that, for some reason, players have come to take the category "rpg" as a quality stamp, instead of what it should be, a description. I've had people really mad at me when I told them that The Witcher 3 was a mediocre rpg. Even if I told them that I thought that it was a great game, just not that great as an rpg, they were more offended that if I had insulted their mother. Edit: Maybe I should have said decent instead of mediocre. I realize that mediocre sounds more negative than what I intended. Also, my problem with The Witcher may be related to ARPGs in general, and how they are lacking in terms of roleplaying compared to other rpgs.

30:44 - Holy cow I want this addressed. I've enjoyed 2 looter shooters, Borderlands 1 & 2. After that I really wish the dramatic looter systems of pretty much all video games would just die already. Why the hell am I picking up a used coffee cup in the middle of a life and death battle so I can craft a legendary Stick I Picked Up Off the Ground that's better than my common Katana of a Thousand Whispers?

You make some good, while obvious, statements about promises and expectations. However; the excuse bandied about that IF it were an indie game with an early access warning it would have been received differently doesn't sit well at all. Why not say the same for every other broken game? Well, if Anthem were made by the devs of Flappy Bird, it would be a renowned achievement. It wasn't though, and neither was this game. Bad take, my guy.

I appreciate the effort you've clearly put in this video, but I can't help with disagreeing for the most part. At times, you seem to go at lengths to excuse the inexcusable behavior of CD Projekt Red, and as such you come across as a company's fanboy more than anything else. You talk down the opinion of most gamers who spent money on this game, but it was CDPR that created immense expectations for this game. And you can't invite your viewers not to believe the hype while also downplaying the conduct of a company who has clearly acted with malicious intent and greed.