Well, I am at about 45 hours played. I have cleared all the murder batman events and most of the gigs and I feel I am close to the end of the story. My thoughts? This game needed AT LEAST another year in the oven. There is SO MUCH to love in this game and almost every element of what there is to love, is another element there that causes me to hate it. The world itself is colorful and vibrant, but when you get right down to it, its actually very shallow. The people of the world make no sense and have some of the worst AI behaviors I have seen in a long time. I have played all the Witcher games and expected the story telling at least to be on the same level, a game where your choices truly do change the story and the side quests are amazing adventures on their own. Without spoilers what I can say is they made factions in the game that have no actual bearing on anything. They put police in the game, but they are a joke. There is an entire mechanic of Street Cred, but it just opened more jobs and no matter how awesome I am, nobody ever knows who I am. The stealth in the game constantly teeters between super OP and completely broken.
For a game that was really advertising making your own style and choices, you really don't have much say in either. You kind of just have to wear whatever the best thing is you can find. Towards the end of the game you can at least craft some things, but my character still generally looks like a cross between a Portland Hipster and a wanna be pimp. You pick up all these awesome modified and customized weapons, but you yourself cannot modify them much outside of optics and a suppressor. Also, weapon variety itself is pretty narrow.
That scene we all saw in the trailers, when there was that fight to rescue the lady and give her to the Trauma Team? Yeah, that's pretty much the only place you will see slightly destructible environments other than constantly exploding debris that will occasionally launch you at a wall faster than the speed of light. Tech weapons are pretty cool, but not sure why they didn't just call them rail guns, which is what they are. Smart weapons are fun, but ultimately outshined by other weapons constantly. I do enjoy a lot of the quick hacks, they make for some fun tactical engagements.
Vehicles... well lets just cut that one short by saying I hope CD Project Red never tries to make a racing game.
TLDR; I really feel betrayed by CD Project Red. Elder Scrolls games are more playable at launch than this game is. It is blaringly obvious this game had very little, if any, testing before they released it. The controls, which are not very customizable, cause extreme frustration. If you try to play a stealthy character prepare to accidentally skip conversations somewhat regularly. Also prepare to miss massive gaps of conversation because the "Answer call" option, is not actually an option. You will answer that call no matter if you are already in a conversation or not. The main story still shines though, you can still see at least some of the talent from the Witcher games was put into the main story and it's characters, its just everything around that story is basically broken. In a year of things that have let us down and betrayed us, I was really really hoping this would help us go out on a positive note. Well... I was wrong.
System Specs:
Windows 10 Pro
i9 9900k
Nvidia RTX 2080ti
64gb 3200 ram
Game installed on a 1tb M.2 drive