I think the negative reviews are warranted for gamers but not for software developers. The game is complex. It introduces tons of new stuff (like hacking, cyberware gear, scanning, brain dances, etc...) that makes it a programming challenge.

The team did definitively over-extend themselves and failed to deliver a perfect? product but I don't see why this is being shunned here. They pushed the limits where it comes to Open World games and GTA has to up their game a LOT in the next release.

> It introduces tons of new stuff (like hacking, cyberware gear, scanning, brain dances, etc...) that makes it a programming challenge.

I'm sorry, but as a software dev with some hobby experience in game development, I disagree with this.

* hacking: tons of other games have a hacking component, either as a hack this computer, or break this lock, or make an enemy turret be friendly, or control this enemy. Fallout has hacking, Batman Arkham series has hacking (and enemy control), PoE has enemy take over skills etc

* cyberware gear: there is no difference between a "cyber deck" and a "helmet of might". Also, I think Deus-Ex has cyberware gear...

* scanning: Arkham games have a beautiful implementation of the concept. Horizon Zero Dawn has scanning.

* brain dances: this is simply playing a pre "recorded" 3d scene with some elements removed based on the "mode" selected. This is not a very hard thing to do, from a software development perspective, but requires lots of content. And guess what, there are like 4 brain dances in the game: the tutorial, the find the chip mission, the find the voodoo lady mission and the side mission with the cow dude.

And this is a recurring thing with Cyberpunk 2077, lack of content. I wish they'd spent less on getting Keanu Reaves to "star" and more on adding more clothing options or side missions, or give the beggars more lines. It would have been really cool to stay a while and listen to a beggar about that time their tank got blown up and they had to trek back from behind enemy lines...

Here is the thing, you can both like the game and critique the technical aspects.

Those may be "common" features across a number of games, but no one is sharing code in games. The hobby experience is shifting with respect to how broad the Unity marketplace is starting to be in pluggable modules, but AAA games is still mostly the land of massive NIH and almost every game is still much more a bespoke artisanal thing with very little reused under the hood from game to game than any game player imagines.

This seems especially so in CDPR's case: they aren't using Unreal or any other off-the-shelf engine, they developed their own engine bespoke for The Witcher. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first game to use that engine for something that wasn't The Witcher series. A lot of their technical hurdles seem almost entirely related: it doesn't seem like it should be a huge surprise that a game engine originally built for a setting where the fastest traveling vehicle is a horse starts to fall down with performance problems when you introduce cars and sky cars and planes.

(Some small credit where credit is due: Rockstar at least started with GTA and then moved to RDR. Cars to horses seems to make more sense as a transition for a game engine than the other way around.)

Absolutely there are probably technical things CDPR could have done to avoid some of the problems they've had, but it was way more of a "programming challenge" than "why didn't they just copy and paste the hacking component from Fallout [Bethesda/Microsoft] and scanning from Arkham Asylum [Rocksteady/Warner Brothers] and call it a day?" (They couldn't, there's no way to access those components from other companies. There's no "Unity store" for that sort of stuff. There's not even a "Unity" here: all three of those franchises have extremely different bespoke game engines that never leave the doors of their development companies or publishers.)

Sorta obvious they knew what the game was and that's exactly why they backed up the dump truck of money on Keanu

Watchdogs already did all those ideas brilliantly. Cyberpunk took most of those ideas and gave them a half-assed clunky implementation that should have been embarrassing for them in comparison. Every time Cyberpunk introduced a new concept I got so excited, thinking about all the potential for fun and how they might develop the ideas as the game progressed. And then there was no follow through.

It's a wonderful world/backdrop/setting. I like the story. There's 50x as much cutscenes and consequence-free dialog choices as there needs to be. I occasionally had fun with the missions. But overall it was a big basket of good ideas that they dropped on the floor.

Haven't played CP so I can't comment on this specific aspect, but actions like hacking, taking over cameras, robots, or augmenting your character were already present in earlier tiles. Specifically, Deus Ex can be praised here. The hacking mini games were great, while augmentations opened many new ways to complete the missions, dramatically changing the gameplay.