played about 2 hours and while i'm obviously just scratching the surface it's also becoming increasingly apparent this isn't for me, not right now at least. an initially obtusely complex set of interlocking systems and a UI that feels like it's playing family guy clips in the corner pretty quickly gives way to it just being yet another AAA big open world with crafting and skill trees and dialogue choices.

the presence of a story that seems more than obligatory is a nice change but it's not enough. these huge open worlds tend to be good sandboxes, but also tend to be poorly equipped to narratively deal with the degree of direction given to the player, leaving most choices feeling either nonsensical or pointless (just the fact that the 3 starts all converge to the same thing after almost no time feels like a bad omen).

hearing from friends who played before me that it's basically impossible to make a bad build and you'll be OP eventually regardless is also underwhelming, especially considering you don't start out that underpowered to begin with (becoming OP works in morrowind because you can't do shit at the beginning, but within the first 2 hours of cyberpunk you're mowing down waves of enemies with nothing but a pistol and whatever else you find lying on the ground). feels like it completely trivializes character building into "buy all the perks for the type of gun you're going to use", although again this is from a perspective 2 hours into the game, so, grain of salt.

it seems okay if you like these sorts of games! but to me it feels like it's falling right into most of the design holes most of these huge budget open world "go anywhere do anything" type games have been falling into for decades. shrug