Played last night around 7pm eastern, after the slow download of the day 1 patch (because EVERYONE in the world was doing the same on Steam)
First impressions, only played a short while so still have a lot to do, haven't gotten to the Johnny Silverhand stuff yet or anything, playing with the Street Kid lifepath:
THE BAD
- BUGS: I mean where is the quality control? The visual and audio bugs are so glaring and present from the jump, it's not like they didn't see them over the fucking 8 years of development. They really kill the immersion
- CONTROLS: The controls for things like hacking and stealth just seem.......clunky, unintuitive.
- INTERFACE: The amount of menus and thus button clicks you need to look through your various items and abilities is really too much, definitely needs to be streamlined. It kinda reminds me of a guy who builds a custom PC that has a cool key-enabled front panel with multiple buttons you then have to press in order to turn on the system. I mean, visually it looks cool, but it's really just added fluff that slows things down and makes it less fun and smooth
- INVENTORY: There are all sorts of things you can pickup on your travels, but the inventory just becomes a mess of stuff. Ashtrays and guitar picks and vinyl records. Sometimes less is more guys. There's also a lot of little data pads or whatever they are that offer information on the gameworld and happenings that you can pickup and read, but it's just too much. The gameworld is so beautiful who wants to sit there scrolling through gobbles of text? Reminds me of Witcher III where they had all these books that gave insight into the lore of the world, but there was just so much to pour through it takes you out of the world at large.
- SHALLOW/DUPLICATED CROWDS: Night City in my game is set to high crowds so there's a lot of people moving about. You can talk to almost anyone, but most of them just have some basic responses, nothing all that exciting, so you feel like most of the people are filler and it makes them less engaging I guess? Plus I've encountered so many duplicated character models, so wandering around you'll see three of the same person (sometimes in different clothing) all within close proximity to one another, which kinda kills some of the immersion
THE GOOD
- CHARACTERS/VOICE ACTING: I haven't gotten to the Keanu Reeves voiced Johnny Silverhand yet, but I always found him to be a fairly wooden actor so I don't have high expectations there anyway. However, so far in the early game the characters and voice overs have all been fairly solid, helping to create an immersion that I enjoy
- GUNPLAY: I actually had low expectations given it's an RPG and the Fallout series wasn't that great with gunplay. But they definitely did a decent job with the guns here
- VISUALS/NIGHT CITY: I'm fortunate that I have a 12-core Ryzen 3900XT plus a new RTX 3070 so my game is on maxed Ultra settings at 1440p and so far running smooth. Night City is absolutely stunning to look at, sometimes you just want to walk around and see the sights, explore what's around that next corner
- BACKGROUND CHATTER: From background characters yapping (which I'm sure offer tidbits into the gameworld and some future encounters or missions) and the radio and tv channels offering up all sorts of content (although I'm still early in, so it's possible this turns into repeated stuff quickly) I'm enjoying the immersion it creates into the game world.
