Ditto to all of the above.

I've been enjoying the game on the whole (playing on PS4 Pro), some really great characters (and very well voice acted too for the most part), interesting story, decent enough side content, but some really key issues:

1) Frequent and repeated bugs and crashes. Frequent enough that even some basic QA testing should have picked them up. If someone on the dev team had played the game for even an hour, they'd have a good list of things that need fixing.

2) Lots of locked doors - most buildings in the city are inaccessible. If you can enter a building, it's likely because it's a shop or a quest location. This means that exploration of this open world is not really encouraged - the overworld map looks hideous because it has all the markers for side quests and such on it from the start, no need to find things out for yourself. Afte a while you basically just fast travel from quest to quest because you're not missing much and it might help you avoid a bug on the way.

3)Overall polish. Not a huge issue but CDPR made a thing of not releasing the game until it was 'ready'. I would not consider the current version of the game ready for anything other than another few months of dev time. Things like the combat and driving feeling cheap, audio not playing, having to wait for NPCs and objects to render in, some of the background voice acting being janky, all really feels like it needs work.

I believe they have significant patches planned for January and February, so we'll see how that goes.

Ooo good to have a Chorrolite with hands on experience with the game weigh in. Your words make me feel like they could actually fix this game if they handle the patches right.

HAZMICK!!!!! WOO HOO !!!!!!!! It is so good to see you on here!!!

Thank you for the in depth review here; really prefer to hear it first hand from you than all the reviews on Youtube put together. Your review actually does give me hope that they will try to pull this back together and fix the issues.

I was really focused on this game because it was touted as "Open World RPG;" so when I saw how linear it seemed in the gameplay vids I was really getting leery over that being true. (so your words didn't come as a surprise on that). It came across to me (without actually playing it) like the shooters my son played; which disappointingly had no real exploration or loot to be found that wasn't blatant if you did find a way to stray around searching. Darn, I was really excited about this game.

*mALX turns Black Desert back on...*

This is why I’m gonna wait a year on major releases and instead focus on indie / older stuff. Bugs are only good if you’re the type of person to eat them, after all.

EW!!!! Gross!!!

Glad we have someone here who can speak from firsthand experience. I really don't want to rely solely on what people I don't know are saying and then parrot off their opinions when I have no personal experience. It being someone I know is at least a much better alternative.

Can you speak on a lot of the other complaints about the game? Some of the things I've heard:

• Linearity of the story and lack of real choices when we were promised much more
• Rarely having the option to attack a situation in multiple ways (from what I hear, stealth is awful and not viable for most of the time
• Lackluster gunplay
• Gang relations, or lack thereof when we were supposed to be able to interact a great deal with them
• NPCs blatantly spawning and despawning
• Little capacity for customization (e.g cars, how your story plays out based on what background you chose such as corpo)
• Crafting being useless or horribly designed (I've heard several different complaints)

Sounds a lot to me like the marketing went seriously overboard with their advertising of what you could do in the game. If that's the case, and if I was a developer, I'd want to strangle them.

I did see a video of an NPC in a wheelchair. The PC walked up to him and punched him. The NPC got up from his chair, cowered for few moments, then ran away...

Maybe the PC was like some cyberpunk Jesus with a unique “laying of hands” method?

“Thou art healed! Get up and walk mutha f*****!” *punch*

Khajiit beat me to it, I was going to post something along those lines too, lol.

Linearity of the story and lack of real choices

I'm not sure how far through the story I am, perhaps a little over half way? Anyway yes the main story is very linear, there are a few parts which branch off to make it feel like you have a choice but ultimately you will circle back to the same spot. Perhaps some choices impact the ending - we'll see.

Otherwise there aren't a lot of choices that really impact the game world. There are a lot of options in conversations that make it feel like you're making a decision, but you're really not. There are also 4 romance 'options' in the game, but they are determined by your character's genatalia and voice, so you can't actually choose. (side note, I did a romance questline the other day and the final quest was very sweet - good writing, scene direction etc.)


Rarely having the option to attack a situation in multiple ways (from what I hear, stealth is awful and not viable for most of the time

There's usually a choice between stealth and not-stealth, with each being equally viable. There's no real benefit to stealth though, everything works out the same if you just go in guns blazing and it's probably a lot easier and faster that way.


Lackluster gunplay

Absolutely. Guns feel weak and there's not a very large selection (about half a dozen types of gun and most look the same). I've mainly been using melee weapons, specifically the mantis forearm blades, as well as hacking enemies in combat to overload their cybernetics and whatnot.


Gang relations

There's none of that. Gang members are the general enemies you face in side quests and the early campaign, I haven't found any way to befriend them. Each district of the city has a gang emblem on the main map, but as far as I can tell it means very little - perhaps there are some side quests that I need to do for that.


NPCs blatantly spawning and despawning

Once or twice, most notably a quest NPC who was driving me to a quest objective. She popped back in when we arrived and finished her dialogue all in one go. Enemy NPCs have a habit of randomly spawning in the middle of combat (law enforcement in particular do this all the time if you have a wanted level)


Little capacity for customization (e.g cars, how your story plays out based on what background you chose such as corpo)

Zero car customisation, you can just buy other cars but all perform the same. Character background determines your introduction questline, and some empty dialogue choices throughout. It's mentioned a lot so does feel quite good sometimes but no real impact - again perhaps at the end something might change.

I haven't found a way to change my character's hair/tattoos etc after the initial character customisation. Maybe I've missed something. You CAN change your cybernetic implants though, and there are quite a few options which all feel quite useful.


Crafting being useless or horribly designed

Crafting is a tacked on afterthought, and upgrading items is prohibitively expensive. I've been trying to upgrade a shirt I got at the start of the game, but it's so costly that it's still half as effective as the garbage clothes I find on enemies.

Yikes.