Ehh, i thought the combat in Witcher 3 was decent and the same goes for Cyberpunk, the world interactivity is not Elder Scrolls or Rockstar levels but factoring in most of the standard open world games i would say its fine, but its a fair issue especially when it comes to Cyberpunk which i will explain below.
I never understood this type of criticism, do people really want their open worlds to be filled with pointless and boring side-activities that have nothing to do with the game? I saw this same type of complaint for elden ring.
I agree with you, totally, personally i am not a big fan of this "Rich and Deep" Interactivity that a lot of people talk about, i dont find it fun to go into Red Dead Redemption 2 so that i can:
1- Milk my cow
2- Play some uninspired copy pasted minigame like Black Jack and Poker all of which i can play on any web site with real people.
3- Clean my stable of horse-shit
4- Go hunting which is very polished i admit, but to me it was a tedious boring task, you have to wait for the deer at the perfect moment and use all sort of tedious stuff in order to get its pelt perfectly in form so that you can? you can do what? hmm you can sell it for few cash which you wil never use because the game showers you with money and has little items, or you can use it for camp customization which adds? YES it adds nothing to the game, lol.
So its a side content that is pointless, its just part of the cowboy simulator life the game tries and succeeds at delivering. Kudos to people who like that, i dont find it engaging.
5- Talk to NPCs, say hi 3 times and they may attack you, the fuck??!!? (hyperbole, in GTA V they do attack though)
6- Fishing: again one tedious task that wastes a lot of time for little reward.
However despite my personal and imo valid issues i have with this type of side content, i have to admit that some people find that fun and part of the immersive experience, it does flesh out the world and gives it meaning and life, which is one big reason for Open World route, otherwise why make it open world, just do it hub based levels or level based and the game may be better because of it.
Now the reason i said especially Cyberpunk was because of 2 reasons.
Budget + Setting
Witcher had a lower budget of 80M$ compared to Cyberpunk 300M$+ which is why i expected the game to have some sort of interactive side content.
Also the setting, in Witcher you can do racing on the horse and fist fighting and play card game Gwent, which is to me more than enough given the setting and the budget at the time. It could have used more interactivity like Kingdom Come or Elder Scrolls but that's more or less sufficient.
Cyberpunk had such a futuristic and cool setting to look at, all those building all those shops, it kind of invites the player to interact with it, but the moment you decide to interact with it, you realize there is nothing to do, all you can do is go and shoot bad guys, not even a Card Game. And thats factoring in the setting which allow for TONS of minigames or side content and the HUGE budget they had going for them, so they had no excuse.
Witcher 3 last parts were rushed, some content got cut, which further proves that budget and work force started to reach its breaking point towards the end, but Cyberpunk had more resources so i dont get why they delivered less, we are in 2022 and no sign of Expansions.
I dont even find Yakuza minigames to be that good but Cyberpunk could have used some inspiration from that and implemented some minigames for the player to do in the city, or some more crowd, traffic and traversal interactivity
So to conclude my point, I personally could dismiss the lack in side content because i dont really care about it that much but i totally understand people who are asking for it in Cyberpunk 2077, the game world is definitely lackluster in content.
