There should be an option to play without the main story, because it ruins the whole game.

[Okamikage]

First, I played and beat Cyberpunk 2077 on xbox because it was unplayable on my PC. Second, that is irrelevant to my critique of the narrative; it's identical across all platforms.

TLDR: It's like the game has schizophrenia just as bad as V with Silverhand in his head; open world design with the promise of near endless exploration of a well crafted setting to build your own story in, poorly stitched together with a relatively short and ill-conceived concept-ruining "Call of Duty" level narrative plot for no apparent reason other then "the game needed a main story, so there is one". It's short, awkwardly shoehorned in, and renders the rest of the game pointless.

Ok, I've seen people rail that there is no 'good' ending for V; but I don't see that as the prime issue. I get it, the whole point of the narrative is that NC is a dystopian nightmare city of the future, run by greedy and corrupt corpos and politicians, and no-one really gets out alive. However, if that was the story the writers wanted to tell, then they made the wrong kind of game to tell it. It shouldn't have been an open-world RPG if all they wanted to do was tell a short story about the horror of the dystopian future; it makes the whole rest of their game pointless.

Seriously, the devs crafted a masterpiece setting. The aesthetics are amazing and make NC an awesome setting to wonder around; to explore dark back-allies and neon-lit dive bars, and to do some crazy "Shadowrun" style edge-running through. The diversity of people, the magic of unreal tech, the limitless possibilities of fame and fortune, of death and glory, on the meanest streets of a world gone mad.

The size, scope, detail, and feel of the city give the player a sense of anarchic freedom and a desire to go out and make your own story with your own style; but then it all comes to a screeching halt and rips away all that sense of freedom and possibility with what feels like a last minute narrative written down on a cocktail napkin at the first internal launch party... "oh shi... we forgot the story! Delay the game and put one in!".

The beginning primes you to "make your own legend" and "play by your own rules", but the narrative of the main quest line quickly kills all that and then proceeds to eat itself and any reason to play with horrible cliches and bad narrative direction. It's like they took the story mode from an early "Call of Duty" game, put it in a futuristic "Grand Theft Auto" world, and called it a finished product.

Soon after starting, the game puts you on rails to ensure you're set up to get led to a quick end to your epic run at reaching fame and glory on the streets of NC as a cyberpunk mercenary edge-runner; and no matter how you play it, your story ends not long after you start with you either dead or leaving the city. No fame, no glory, no exploring, and no point to having all the hype around becoming a legend; because you can't. You can't even play the main quest line and still play the full game, not really.

The only way to enjoy the full game, to explore NC and learn it's dark secrets, is to ignore the main story completely, to pretend there is no story; which begs the question, why is there a story at all then? What does it add to the game? Answer: Nothing, it's pointless and shouldn't even exist, or be it's own game or separate mode.

Even the makers of the game acknowledge this glaring flaw by actually making it so that after beating the game, you continue to play by reverting to the last checkpoint BEFORE beating the final quest and pretending you didn't beat it. So, they made a game that the only way to fully play the game they made is to ignore the main story. What a failure of vision and lack of creativity.

From that point on that game is just... boring. It still pretends that you need to 'take control' and find a way to 'stay alive', but it's all fake, and you know it. There is no time limit, no problem to solve or you'll die; it's all a lie. There is no reason to increase your skill and reputation, because there is no reason to go up against the main 'bad guys', you beat them already; even if the game pretends you didn't, you know you did.

No matter how high your 'rep' is, it changes nothing about how people respond to you or how the main quest ends, it's just a requirement for more mods that you don't need because you already beat Smasher and stomped a building full of corpo goons. From then forward, it's just GTA in the future, but with even less motivation to do anything. The game literally makes itself pointless.

I finished the Judy, Panam, River, Delamain, and Johnny quests, and got my street cred to 50, before doing the final mission around level 30, and now, the game is boring, pointless, and seems like a waste of time, because no matter what I do, it's just going to be the same outcome. There is no reason to play, because the game killed itself by removing all motivation to progress. There is no reward, no better ending, no great challenge to be preparing for. It's just all just... pointless.

At this point, the only DLC I really want is one that deletes the main quest line and just lets you start running contracts without getting involved with the biochip at all; maybe gaining street cred opens up bigger gigs and working with corps or with Rouge or other legendary runners to pull off crazy missions. IDK, at this point, I kind of regret beating it at all, because now I know it was all pointless from the start.

Congrats CDPR, you wanted to tell a story about how trying to beat NC and become a legend was a pointless endeavor, but your whole game is based on trying to beat NC and become a legend, so all you did was prove your own game pointless; and now it's just boring. So, in a way, I guess you all did an outstanding job at proving your point; don't bother trying, you'll either die or leave before you succeed... So I guess I'm leaving NC behind too, because why would I stay and play if I already beat it and it didn't even matter?

[TheLostOne(JamilNielsen)]

skimmed over a few parts but i agree.
and CDPR, don't take our feedback wrong.
we speak because we care.

[SKORG]

While I do like the main story, and do like Silverhand's parts alot, the pacing seems to be all over the place, especially when you complete all the interesting secondary/character quests. It would be nice if CDPR fixed the pacing by adding more ACTUAL quests(not gigs) in Act 2/3 or extended the game from Prologue to Act 1 or from Act 3 to the Ending.

This might be extremely far-fetched theory-ranting but on the physical copy of the map you receive if you ordered the CP2077 Collector's Edition, there are four 'red' areas labelled, one is Arasaka Tower, and three are areas of equal story significance (One was the Spaceport, another was a Nuclear Power Plant, and I forgot what the other was.) We can surmise from the information released from CDPR's development of CP2077 that the game was originally supposed to be absurdly larger than what they currently have, my guess is realized they were running out of time, went with what would sell the most copies. Regardless, these areas are still listed, you can't go to them in the base game, and they almost undoubtedly would play either some role in the games endings, or would involve entire Acts revolving around them.

So, to make sense of this blind rant, I think that CDPR had way more planned, realized they were running out of time, decided to go with Silverhand's story as the main part, and hence why the pacing is all over the place/why so much was cut, and were pressed to the last minute to get the story set up in a somewhat coherent manner. V wasn't suppose to have SIlverhand with him the entire game, so maybe sometime in the future we'll get extensions to V's story after Silverhand is gone.

[schulein]

I really like walking through NC. Did all missions, gigs etc. When I walk though NC and I see all doors that are locked I think: CDPR could bring out tons of expansions in which in the current world lots more buildings would open up and provide space to do missions that are not connected to the main mission but provide gang warfare, spying, fighting crime etc. I would buy that kind of side mission DLC.