Because it is not as good a game as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, to put it simply, CD Projekt Red hit a home run with The Witcher 3. They made a fantastic single-player RPG set in a vast open-world that felt real, felt lived-in, felt fully fleshed out. The main story was gripping. The side quests were uniformly entertaining and felt organic to the world in which they existed. There were some technical hiccups, a few features that didn’t land so well, but on the whole, it was a labor of love, and it showed.
Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t have any of that. I like the game, and I was hyped for it just like anyone else who follows video games and played The Witcher 3. It pains me to say it, but this game is just not nearly as good as CDPR’s last outing. It is serviceable, but little more than that. That might be okay in the long run. It’s hard for even the very best to outdo themselves every single time out. But in the short term, there is a tangible disappointment from a lot of people.
What’s went wrong?
Well, first and foremost, the game was released well before it should have been. That will always create disappointment, especially when bugs and glitches destroy immersion or, even worse, break the game’s functionality. Cyberpunk is guilty on both counts, there. And before anyone reacts unfavorably to that statement, I understand that a large, open-world game like this requires a certain amount of player “beta-testing” after release.
But at its heart, for all CDPR’s ambition, they just whiffed on a whole lot of things here. And it’s not hard to see where. GTA and other open-world games have created certain expectations when making an open world, and those bars were met very scarcely and far between.