Cyberpunk is one of my all-time favourite games, I don't log hundreds of hours in games usually, but this is one of the few where I really spent a significant (for me) time.. So, in short, I recommend this game to people.

While praise is all well and good, and deserved, it won't stand alone, so, while I overall do recommend the game to just about anyone, I want to focus my post on the things I dislike in the game, I'll ignore the things that's been fixed since launch, I had a great experience right from the start, so this is not me being jaded.

1. Still weirdly buggy in places. Just today, I bought a gun off of a vendor, didn't appear in my inventory, no popups or other messages on why.. I tried reloading, same thing, tried buying other stuff, money is taken but nothing reaches inventory. There's no excuse for this, if it's because I lack some skill or level, or other hidden state that makes this weapon unfit for my character, I either need to be shown or told or blocked from buying it.

2. Performance.. It seems too optimized for crap computers.. too conservative.. I have 64 gib of ram, and the game never uses more than maybe 6.. but prefers to pop things in from disk, this is insane.. I don't want LOD artifacts due to loading.. LOD is for rendering and processing performance and it CAN be for memory usage optimization too, but don't optimize when it's not needed! At least have an option to "use all the memory you want".. Stream the area around me in from disk while I walk around, fill that memory! I COULD fix this by buying even more memory and running it from a ramdisk, but that's kind of silly. Sometimes it takes long time for someone to have a face..

3. Traffic, this annoys me so much, it breaks suspension of disbelief and reminds me that I'm in this tiny fake sphere.. There are the "headlamp" sprites for long distance, they don't have any behaviour, they're like the simcity 2000 cars, and worse, they are EXACTLY like them, in that they just exist as a cell, they're not individual entities in the game, so they simply pop in out of existence, and when I get closer to them, they dissapear!! So I can be out somewhere with no (real) cars in sight, and chase down a car from it's headlamps or taillights only to have it dissapear into thin air when I get close to it. Again, too conservative on performance, at least have a "consistent traffic" option and allow us to not have this insane behavior where parts of the world exist only outside the sphere of the player.. I want cars to actually travel, have destinations and not just drive around aimlessly, cities skylines does this quite well.

4. Sometimes too scripted, there are scenes where I'm talked to even though I've been hiding the entire time, the person couldn't have known I was there, they couldn't have seen me! I don't expect hitman levels of freedom, but come on.

5. The loading screen when entering and existing dogtown, it's not THAT big, I have memory, keep it loaded if there's free memory for it, I do understand it might not be technically convenient to stream it as dynamically as the non-dlc stuff (though, really, come on, it's not THAT hard either, rethink what DLC means, patch the game files enough to make it possible instead of the loading screen).. This has a few gameplay downsides too, for example it seems to not really be possible to sneak in and out of dogtown.. shame.

6. Clothing.. At least make it an option to have it be a dress-up simulator.. It's a cyberpunk roleplaying game, I wish it was a bit more hardcore on this point, like it was before it was patched, if the stupid pink dress has better HP, well, then you should have to consider that compromise between preference of aesthetics and preference of gear stats. That's a game-play element too. If favor form over function, that should have an impact, too.

7. The economy in night city just don't make sense.. You have vending machines selling €$10 cofees, but random stuff can be picked up and sold for that same amount, it makes no sense how we have a literally littered with easily obtainable cash, while at the same time have vendors taking a bigger effort selling things in the same price range.. If you can just pick up 5-10 €$ items from the ground and sell them in those machines conveniently placed everywhere, why go through the effort of selling 5-10 €$ items? Also, aside from the addicts, why are there any poor people in a world where money is just strewn around ? Why are there gun vendors when there are literally free guns and ammo laying on the street, seemingly for anyone to take with no consequence ? It's not like the police gets after you, or like someone else accuses you of stealing ?

8. Law and order.. Police everywhere, in a total surveillance society, and yet, you can go up and shoot a cup and then hide for a minute and you're good to go? wtf.. At least make it an option or difficulty thing "abide the law!" I can run a red light in front of a cop and they do nothing ? I can drive over double lines with no consequence, and obviously not because the police are too busy to do anything about it.

9. PC culture.. So after I gave that kid a €$1000 and she just went "meh" on me, and didn't really help me.. even the nades didn't work. Gives the sensation that night city is not actually a dangerous place to be, even though the characters in the game talks about how hard everything is.. Does not seem that hard of a place if you can get away with provoking adult strangers with no consequence what so ever. I'm generally not for graphic violence against anyone in particular and I don't think the player should be rewarded either, but in the context of that world, it makes no sense that "in this particular zone, you can't draw your gun, and nades don't do damage".

10. Inventory.. Too much quality of life here, why can V carry a metric ton of stuff around, even with augmented strength, where does she physically put it? Backpack of holding? Same with trunk in car.. Had the game had scarce resources, a limited inventory would have added an element of strategy and frustration, what to get out with you ?
In a game littered with items so worthless people won't even pick them up off the street, but somehow they can be sold for cash, it serves only to make you the trashman of night city, keeping tens of items only to sell them for a tiny amount of cash.

11. Female V's voice acting is all over the place.. At times, she reacts like she's never seen blod before, other times she's like "i've seen everything, nothing surprises me anymore"- especially her reaction to seeing the corrupt cop covered in blood.. she seemed super worried and surprised, at the same time, she don't really have any empathy with them, they're corrupt cops, after all, and she's seen so much worse with less reaction already..

12. The metro.. I know you promised it early on, but it's pretty badly executed, loading zones? It's very very obvious that I'm somehow in a different world when riding it, and why? I could travel the same places by foot? The metro in GTA was able to do it.. In cyberpunk, I'd expect at the very least, the same amount of freedom, the stations shouldn't be a separate loading zone, and so disconnected from the main world.. And I should be able to jump onto the roof and hitch a free ride..

Random bugs
1. Second race with claire can't be completed, I can reload from anywhere previous to the race, but her car just jumps out of track, with no way of getting out of that place.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=866uqlw20Mg

That said, it's still a great game, and now I'll go off to play it some more.

I can't say I disagree with anything here. And I certainly agree on the traffic NPCs - hell, even the zombies in Dying Light have more personality than the traffic, and NPCs in general, in Cyberpunk 2077.

The walkers just have a preset selection of generic, negative responses, and the kids just makes me want to slap(!) them. You can't even point a weapon at them, and ONLY the kids (and any building and environment object, but whatever) are immune to grenades. Like WTF!? This game was initially called a "do anything / life simulator". That is so far from the truth, it's going well beyond a lie.

But the traffic...ugh, what a way to kill the immersion in a game. I can jump naked on the roof of any car, and no one seems to even care. It just drives off eventually, with you on top of it. You stand in front of any car, it just stays put, doing nothing for infinity.

I once used a really nice car from City Center (Caliburn) as a free bus by standing on the roof, as I did not yet have enough Strength to steal it properly. I stood on top of it for almost 20 minutes as it drove to Little China, where it stopped in a dead-end alley. I jumped off, turned around...and the car was just gone.

So yeah, the Cyberpunk 2077 traffic is just an immersion element, it's just an annoyance and target practice at best.

One thing about the performance though...while I can agree this game is catering to too many different PC performance levels (it should NEVER have been released on Playstation 4!), and definitely is getting too complicated for its own good with all the DLSS, FSR, XeSS, AI upscaling BULLSHIT that is only causing issues...system RAM is not something the game would need a lot of.

VRAM, however, to handle all the visual renders, that is something Cyberpunk 2077 enjoys. But even a 24 GB VRAM 3090 / 4090 won't be maxed, and I do have questions about that.

I will admit I have not run system checkers or live file readers while playing the game, but having the game set in SSD-mode, and disabled any sort of "performance enhancing" features, I can't say I have noticed much of "popup"-renders, not even in City Center. At least not to the point of actively taking notice of it.

There is the usual Line Of Sight-limit, of course, where people pops out of thin air when driving fast or turning around too quickly, but, meh, I have long since accepted the limitations of the game.

Playing on custom High settings, with reduced shadows, with an undervolted, 5,00 GHz all-core OCed i9 10900K, RTX 3080, 64 GB RAM, and dedicated SSDs for OS and Games.