How does it compare to, say, Deus Ex? To me it seems about on par with Deus Ex’s enemy AI from what I remember of their recent entries. Easy to fool by hacking, not sophisticated in shootouts. Note that I was specifically talking about crowd AI in other posts btw (which are way below games built around crowd AI like GTA).
You haven’t made any points about crowd AI. All you’ve done is excuse Cyberpunk’s terrible crowd AI with “but it’s not a sandbox”.
I made points about the police AI. You ignored them & deflected with a “mad bro?” & a smiley.
I’d say we can do this all night, but I won’t, because I’m not doing it.
But to answer the questions you asked,
“If you take the NPCs out, is it still fun to move around & explore?”
No. It’s not fun to move around & explore in Night City just now. Night City is nothing more than a pretty backdrop that I move through to get to the parts that are actually fun. The main & side missions.
“If you only had gangs or cops present, would there still be gated challenges?”
…
What?
Maybe?
“Does each area have distinct side quests that reflect the local cultural norms?”
Each area has side quests, yes. Most of them have been good. Some of them could’ve been placed in any part of the map with no difference.
Not sure why you wanted me to answer those questions, but there you go.
I’m not playing it. My friend has been playing it and that’s one of his complaints. I’m pretty sure that he would pick Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Human Revolution as having better enemy AI. The police star rating and presence is non-existent according to him and the AI in general isn’t that good.
…because the way your phrased your response seemed aggressively dismissive and seemed to indicate ya had no actual intent to read a response on the matter and were getting pissy just by my engaging. But if that was not your actual intent and I just misread your tone then great! Crisis averted. 
WRT police AI, you are conflating ‘excuse’ and ‘reason’. The ‘reason’ the crowd AI and police system are weak compared to stuff like GTA is because GTA is built around those systems with it being at the core of the design and Cyberpunk is not. It isn’t an ‘excuse’, it is a ‘reason’ or an explanation. If you view it as an excuse, it is due to your presuming it should have been expected to compete with GTA’s sandbox mechanics instead of, say, Deus Ex’s. Notice that at no point did I say the police AI was impressive or anything. I barely interacted with it at all in the game. Just that it doesn’t make sense to me to compare a core element of a sandbox title to a peripheral element of an immersive sim rpg.
Ok. As I said in that post, ymmv. Literally in this case. I personally really liked driving bikes in Cyberpunk and some of the higher end cars. Also liked exploring by jumping/climbing around.
I can rephrase better…I meant if you ditched the backdrop crowd npc’s entirely, would there still be areas that are a challenge to access due to the presence of these adversarial groups. I enjoyed sneaking into gang areas and fighting my way out if I got caught. Not even just on a side mission per se, but just going into an area and seeing what I could loot/etc.
The reason I asked those is because those are the types of questions that are pertinent to open world games (as opposed to sandbox games, which have totally different types of merits to them).
Not sure what he is saying wrt the star rating not being present. It’s definitely there in the game and definitely affects how police respond to you in terms of numbers. They seem to send different types of cops at ya the higher the star rating gets (some cops have that zipping around ability). They do spawn outta thin air in a super unfair way though.
He’s been playing on hard on PS5 and he’s barely seen any cops and in shootouts, the cops never appear or engage based on what he’s told me. He doesn’t understand why there’s a star rating but there’s barely any police presence or police threat at all. He can basically do whatever he wants and have no issues.
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The system definitely isn’t anything impressive, but yeah it is absolutely there. It only triggers if ya kill civilians I think. If ya play carefully ya can avoid that though.
Okay. I’m just going based on what he’s told me. Outside of some technical issues and AI/gameplay, he’s overall enjoying the game. He loves the visuals, audio and story/characters.
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Lol despite some interesting bugs I’m really enjoying this game. Loved the delamain side quest with collecting all his split personalities. Especially the portal nod
The core issue I have here is that you are excusing things like the police AI & wanted system. You’re excusing these things by saying “but it’s not a sandbox”.
That doesn’t matter. Sandbox or not, CDPR chose to implement a police response system, with a player wanted level. They chose to do that & they made a very bad job of it. That’s a valid criticism. Doesn’t matter if you think Cyberpunk’s not a sandbox. It’s something they chose to put in their game & it’s badly done. People are criticising it & they’re well within their rights to do that.
That’s it.
I’m trying to be as clear as possible here, because I’m going to leave it at that. I’ve said my piece. It’s late here. I’m tired.
So then you’d have to say that GTA is crap for having driving that sucks compared to PGR1 on OG Xbox, right? By your own logic and all? Hell the title is named after driving cars away from their owners, after all! /s
It isn’t an ‘excuse’, it’s an explanation. I’m saying it isn’t relevant to judging the game quality itself as that should be premised on what was promised and the kinda game it was designed to be. Merely choosing to implement something doesn’t mean it was some prioritized element central to the game’s loop, so why should it be held up as something of such importance to the experience? It has driving too but racing isn’t central to the experience. There’s a distinction b/t judging a single element in proper context and judging a whole game using unimportant systems being judged out of context.
There just seems to be a bunch of really weird ways where this game is being judged for not being ‘X’ when ‘X’ was never what they claimed it was about. They showed us a few hours of gameplay over the years and delivered basically on all of that in the final game. I dunno how to be more transparent on the game design side of things than that tbh. Their Night City Wire videos in the summer/fall were pretty clear and none of them had any focus at all on crowd AI or policing systems or whatnot.
It just gets real annoying when they showed hours of footage explicitly saying ‘ok here is what the game is, here is what it is about, here is the game loop and how it plays out’…and some folks seemingly just ignored that stuff and inserted hopes n dreams instead.
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Yeah indeed very good review no matter how loud some are screaming to try defending and excuse such awful mechanics with all their weak strengh, it’s just a bad open world game with badly tweaked sandbox elements that’s all. He also brings many additional points to the table on that. Don’t even mention the rest it’s in the vid already.
As long as CDPR themselves said it and even acknowlegded it officially, no matter what anyone says since they said it themselves, the burden is no them, no excsues… People can cry all day, twist it how they want and stay mad nothing would change. Life goes on.
Shipping a game with this kind of A.I is not acceptable in any shape or form. Not to mention other parts.
Listen at 4:46 “Welcome to the Next Generation Of Open World Adventure. Immerse yourself in Cyberpunk 2077” 
Yeah sure!
On top of that CDPR lied about tons of features supposed to be present
We as players were promised prelaunch with these features from CDPR themselves that guarantees the most immersive and deep game ever.
Now what we have outside of the main storyline is one of the worst open world games.
What is alarming is that some of these features were even shown in earlier gameplay trailers
Just go on the official forums, it’s gaining big traction, here is a list of what was promised to consumers with sources provided but it was found missing from the game. Really deceiptive.
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I’ve never once said that Cyberpunk sucks because (for example) it’s police AI isn’t as good as GTA. I’ve never even compared Cyberpunk to GTA. That’s a bone you picked somewhere else. All I’ve said is that it’s valid to criticise this aspect (among others) of Cyberpunk because it is. Once again, CDPR chose to implement this feature. Nobody forced them to do it. They did it & they did it badly. That’s valid criticism.
I wouldn’t say that GTA sucks because it’s driving isn’t as good as PGR. That would be dumb. That was never the kind of point I was making. But if GTA launched with terrible driving then I would say, “the driving is terrible” & that would be fine, because it would be a simple statement of fact, just like saying, “the police AI in Cyberpunk is terrible”.
Do you understand what I’m saying now? I’m not saying Cyberpunk sucks because it’s not GTA. I’ve never said that. All I’m saying is, “this part of Cyberpunk sucks” because it does. Yes, it’s a small part of the game. Yes, I’ve just ignored it & enjoyed what’s good in the game. But it is there & it is badly done.
Now please, let’s drop this. No harm to you, but I’m really not interested in getting bogged down in this kind of endless back & forth. It’s not going to go anywhere because we’re not actually talking to each other, we’re talking past each other. I apologise for quoting you in the first place.
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That might be the disconnect then. Your replies referenced earlier dsicussion in the thread but seemingly out of context. The context of the whole back n forth here (me and Adam from earlier in the thread) was on the basis of folks trying to say the game has really bad crowd AI when compared to GTA and therefore is not great as a game overall. It was that line of thinking that I have been pushing back against, not criticisms of the crowd AI in a vacuum which sounds like what you are talking about now that ya clarified.
It seems like everyone is way too eager to pile on the game tbh. Other games launched with comparable performance issues in the past and got nowhere near the outcry this game got. I personally think there are lots of areas where ppl read something in an interview or whatnot from 2-3 yrs ago and got themselves way overhyped and let their imagination kinda run wild wrt what to presume was in the game too. Despite being shown hours of footage of the gameplay loop described in great detail.
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I’m only about 5 hrs in on the Series X and am not going to really dive into it until the next gen patch but one thing that does bother me compared to Witcher 3 is the NPC’s are pretty useless and on every corner you have multiple NPC’s that look exactly the same.
They need to sort that out and make NPC’s more random looking and actually give some of them some useful dialog and maybe even some quests that spawn from just walking up and talking to them.
The open world aspects do seem like a huge step back from Witcher 3
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Good post from another one from another place.
His own words for anyone trying to defend CDPR on what happened with CP2077 as a result facing class action lawsuit.
"I’m not going to sift through all the marketing and advertising materials provided in the past by CDPR just to prove you wrong because you seem to be allergic to factual information.
You’re more than welcome to do your own research since I can’t be bothered to do your homework for you. Cyberpunk 2077 was advertised to be more than just a typical open-world action/adventure RPG game.
If you truly believe otherwise, you’re absolutely delusional. You and others alike may argue that players had unrealistic expectations but the truth is that CDPR set up those expectations and plugged away at the hype machine.
Do you really believe Keanu Reeves was hired for his exceptional voice acting abilities? The open world in Cyberpunk 2077 , however pretty it may be, does not have as much depth as a 16-year old game like GTA: San Andreas . I’ll ramble on about a random list of features off the top of my head. Player customization is non-existent past the character creation screen. Car customization doesn’t exist. The massive arsenal of weaponry CDPR boasted on about doesn’t exist.
The AI operates entirely on rails and is not dynamic. Expansive quests with branching paths and meaningful decisions don’t exist since nearly 98% of all choices made by the player will lead them to the same destination. The skill system is almost pointless because anyone can breeze through the missions on even the hardest difficulty by simply deactivating cameras and stealthily incapacitating enemies.
The enemy AI in this game also makes the Amazon virtual chat AI look like a genius. Progression in the “Street Cred” system is pointless because it just becomes a mediocre grind in order to acquire new items from vendors and acquiring new vehicles via text. Oh that’s right, no car dealerships are present in this game because we have to purchase a car via text. Stellar! It’s the year 2077 and we’re still using OfferUp and Craigslist! Oh wait, what about life paths you say? Darn, guess what? Aside from a 20-30 minute introduction, life paths don’t matter in this game.
Yeah sure, there may be different dialogue options available to each respective life path, however, most dialogue options will lead players in the same direction and have them arrive at the same destination.
And the list can go on and on. But I digress and will leave you and others with an image of changes made from the 2018 gameplay demo:"
List of every single detail from the 2018 gameplay demo that was changed or cut from the final game
Bonus
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Development must of been chaotic if all that was cut
You make me sad now. Wow, that’s a lot.
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If anyone imagines they can win a lawsuit based on standard practices where content is cut, they are gonna be in for a very rude awakening. Also not sure why anyone should care what ppl from other places are claiming. Hell, tons of stuff on that list aren’t even legitimate. 