Managed to put 25 hours in cp2077 somehow. Mostly because it's an rpg so time moves slower, but also because the gameplay is serviceable enough. The driving, controlling V, presentation, combat ... it's all ok, so I'm not yawning at the thought of playing it.
But I still find it really underwhelming. I cannot for the life of me get invested in this story or these characters. Absolutely nothing about the game is clicking with me. You know the moment when you realize "ok, this is something great". That still hasn't happened to me and at like 10 hour mark I realized it never will.
Some things that I believe detract from my experience a lot are:
- first person - it just doesn't work with me anymore. Maybe Sony destroyed me with this, but I remember very rarely loving fps games, with the exception of Stalker and Half life. I just keep feeling disconnected to V, to movement, to combat (especially when using katanas), to basically everything.
- no proper cutscenes - this absolutely destroys any sense of urgency and story. I keep thinking how some of these conversations would be better if I had actually different camera shots, and not being able to look around the room like an idiot while someone's opening up their soul to me. Zero investment.
- story - don't care about it. Not feeling the plot at all, and it's honestly difficult to follow a lot of times. English is not my first language, but I never have any issues following conversations, reading books or playing games. But something's off with this game. Maybe it's the way it's presented, or the number of characters and different names thrown at me, or the way dialogue flows, but I often find it goes too quickly, and I can't wrap my head around why I'm doing what I'm doing a lot of times.
- missions - this is a gripe I have with most open world games. The way missions are structured and given to V makes them all feel like busywork. Since it's an open world game, after every mission someone has to tell what you should be doing next. The game can't craft these transitions naturally, they always have to be split in separate, trackable missions. That immediately disconnects me from the game, since I'm reminded I am going through a list of events, not through a story that's flowing naturally. Compare that to something like Jedi Survivor (which I also played recently), where after being initially "told" to go to a planet, everything on that planet flows seamlessly. You don't finish a task and then get a notification to speak with someone to start a new task. You start exploring, go through encounters, traverse and things just keep happening by themselves, no weird stop mission/start mission transitions that all open world games do, which just feels so artificial.
- writing - it's too jaded, but not in a fun way. Corpos suck, night city will kill you, everyone's an asshole, everything sucks, dying of old age in this town is impossible, etc. Yeah, I get it, but I don't see how anyone can live here and not be depressed 24/7. I guess that's the point, but that same energy transfers into how characters talk and it's really off putting. Maybe I'm projecting onto every other character because Johnny is all I can think of and how annoying he is.
Open world games are truly a mistake most of the time.
Edit: Remembered a few more:
- no exploration - I still don't know how to explore a modern city in a video game. Everywhere you go, you do so via the city streets. City streets lead you to normal places where people go to every day. How can you find something interesting if you're being lead there by something that every npc in a game uses? You can jump off a street and turn right into an ally, but that ally is just a shortcut to yet another large street where a bunch of cars drive. I'm not exploring, I'm just moving through already established and million times visited places. Plus you can't enter any building so it's not like you can find something "hidden" in there. To explore I need the ability to go off the beaten path, find something not marked on the map, enter some hidden structure and find its secrets. That doesn't exist here from what I have seen. Why even have an open world game if you can't explore.
- constantly being on the phone - someone's calling you once every 5 minutes in this game it seems. Maybe it's a statement how we're constantly available in this day and age, but I still don't like it. Just let me breathe a little, please.
