In terms of tone, I wonder whether you're going for realism or fantastical. There is a faithful recreation of New York in here, albeit one thrown into crisis, but sometimes I notice tonal clashes with that. For example, there are gang members who I've shot about ten times in the head with a small machine gun, and they're still running at me with a baseball bat. Suddenly that's remarkably fantastical. Do you recognise those tonal anomalies?
I think there's obviously going to be a difference between authentic and realistic. We're not making a simulator. If you watch a fight in a Hollywood film, the amount of punches each person can take to the head without falling is crazy. Both the hero and the villain would have such absurd amounts of head trauma even half way through the fight. But that's an accepted unrealism.
In movies you accept that, and in RPGs, you just accept those gameisms too. I would say that the really tough enemies carry lots of amour, and we try to explain why they're tougher.
Perhaps it was just me then. Some of it took me out of the game. If I was shooting at a tank, I could understand why it could just sit there and absorb the bullets. But someone in a hoodie holding a gun sideways just took me a while to adjust with.
For sure, and we're hoping players will still be immersed, and it's one of the elements in this great open-world RPG.
