My problem with Cyberpunk is it feels like all style and no substance. Night City is probably the best looking city I’ve ever seen in a game. The world designers did a phenomenal job with the visuals and atmosphere.
But it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough to do in the city or ways to interact with it or the NPCs. There should be more buildings you can enter and more activities to do. For me that’s what sets GTA and Red Dead apart from Cyberpunk. They have much more to do when you’re not on missions.
The game is definitely too sparse and spread out. It should’ve taken more inspiration from the likes of yakuza than gta and made a smaller but more dense world to play in where every nook and cranny ACTUALLY meant something rather than giving the illusion of doing so.
This is something that still disappoints me despite all the updates made to add immersion. The street food vendors just kind of hang out and stare at you. That and how every vendor interaction is just popping open their inventory and grabbing things.
I remember Postal 2 having a really clunky attempt at customer to vendor speech interactions where both were NPCs. Not as cool as a ridable metro system, but still.
To be fair style over substance is one of cyberpunk’s (the style, not specifically the game) main design philosophies…
But yeah, sure, the game could stand some more fleshing up. Most games could.
That said, there’s a lot of stories going on in Night City that you won’t get through quests, but are told bit by bit through messages, notes, minor encounters, and environment design… more than in most similar games I’ve played.
Would it be nice to be able to enter every building, take a job at any random hot dog stand, ignore the quests and, I don’t know, infiltrate Biotechnica and leak all their ugly business to the world…? Sure, but that’s not something V would do (without getting paid), especially once they’re on a timer, the engine probably wouldn’t be able to support, and, most importantly, we’d still be waiting for the game to come out.
My problem with Cyberpunk is it feels like all style and no substance. Night City is probably the best looking city I’ve ever seen in a game. The world designers did a phenomenal job with the visuals and atmosphere.
But it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough to do in the city or ways to interact with it or the NPCs. There should be more buildings you can enter and more activities to do. For me that’s what sets GTA and Red Dead apart from Cyberpunk. They have much more to do when you’re not on missions.
The game is definitely too sparse and spread out. It should’ve taken more inspiration from the likes of yakuza than gta and made a smaller but more dense world to play in where every nook and cranny ACTUALLY meant something rather than giving the illusion of doing so.
This is something that still disappoints me despite all the updates made to add immersion. The street food vendors just kind of hang out and stare at you. That and how every vendor interaction is just popping open their inventory and grabbing things.
I remember Postal 2 having a really clunky attempt at customer to vendor speech interactions where both were NPCs. Not as cool as a ridable metro system, but still.
They could have at least given us some:
“What news from the provinces?”
“I’ve heard others say the same”
“Be seeing you”
To be fair style over substance is one of cyberpunk’s (the style, not specifically the game) main design philosophies…
But yeah, sure, the game could stand some more fleshing up. Most games could.
That said, there’s a lot of stories going on in Night City that you won’t get through quests, but are told bit by bit through messages, notes, minor encounters, and environment design… more than in most similar games I’ve played.
Would it be nice to be able to enter every building, take a job at any random hot dog stand, ignore the quests and, I don’t know, infiltrate Biotechnica and leak all their ugly business to the world…? Sure, but that’s not something V would do (without getting paid), especially once they’re on a timer, the engine probably wouldn’t be able to support, and, most importantly, we’d still be waiting for the game to come out.