Honest Review of Cyberpunk 2077

Starting off I was really excited for this game for many reasons, one big reason is that this studio had a good standing and reputation, and I am enamored with The Witcher series books and story. On PC I have heard its absolutely great and is a night/day difference in comparison to the console experience. But I am not going to lie, there is a weight of disappointment on my experience playing it on my xbox series x, let me tell you why.
The story, the game, the world, and all the hard work that went into creating this world is self-evident. Although the actual performance of the game is absolute crap (in comparison to similar operating games today). The inventory management system kinda grinds my gears the gap between expectations and reality of performance, and the way it is running on the new systems is embarrassing for a game studio of this size and reach. But I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water, because 100% this is  on the management higher in the company and not a reflection of the artists and developers who worked their asses off on this game. This has become a continuous problem in the industry of overselling and over-promising to under-delivering, I believe encapsulates a much larger issue in the workforce at large today, but I’ll keep my personal rampages to a minimum ┬┴┬┴┤ ͜ʖ ͡°) ├┬┴┬┴  for now…
Inventory management…..guys really? There are so many other games out there that do this well… what the hell happened?? Some things you pick up are not even categorized and you have to very carefully go over the full inventory list to find what you were looking for, and they don’t make it an easy task. I spent a quarter of my time in the game so far trying to come up with a system for organizing my inventory that would not completely drive me bonkers. Side note, I am more particular than most so, take that with a grain of a salt, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Performance…..Playing on my xbox series x and 4k tv there were many times I looked at the scenery of the game and well… to put it nicely, Minecraft without ray tracing looks better than some of the scenes in this game. I went from Assassins Creed Valhalla to this…. And well assassin’s creed looks way better on my set up. I was riding with Panam through the badlands on a story mission and looked out the window of the car and the foliage looked terrible. Don’t get me wrong, some of the scenes especially in the city are downright gorgeous, but others look like I time warped back to 2007. I have had the game crash several times already but the silver lining I found was a majority of the time it just froze the game and would start back up right where it left off. I also had a funny experience of being stuck in a loop of falling through the game, but those are passable bugs for me, as long as it doesn’t make me loose time spent on the game ಠ_ಥ
The game is extremely in depth and the world kept me wanting more. The shards alone you collect in the game are probably an 800-page book worth! The attention to detail and design are well done and over all a really fun. That is why I am so torn to say the things about it that I am. But then I think about why this happened, and then I don’t feel so badddd. (i wrote that while humming 'my favorite things')
The root issue…. So we have been seeing this in the gaming industry lately, over promising and under delivering….do I dare bring up the disaster that was fallout 76? We keep seeing this happen, and a lot of us are making the connection between poor treatment of workers, bad management decisions, and this kind of public outcome. I guarantee you that the quality department within cd project red were aware of these problems and told the next person in the hierarchical line of them. There is no way this stuff went unnoticed within the company. Also we have been seeing more stories about studios and their policies for ‘crunch time’, which you may have experienced something similar in your own workplaces whether it be directly or indirectly. The end of month rush, or the end of year book closing, ya know, the huge push on production to ‘make the books look good’. To me this is a symptom of a greater disease that is rotting our businesses from the inside out across all industries.
 Well... This guy's audio essay puts in best.... i know its long but its worth it and i have it starting and hour and sixteen minutes in because that we it starts to coincide with what i am talking about.