After playing the entire game with a few different endings I dont think 2077 is a 'flawed masterpiece' and i think most people have missed THE worst fault the game has:
Obsolete Design.
this game was designed by people who have not played video games in 10 years at the minimum:
the UIs are terrible, obviously rushed, confusing, glitchy and very cumbersome on controller. crafting menu deserves a special note, we cant craft more than one item at a time, we're in the middle of a fight crafting shotgun shells, one by one, for 10 minutes? fun times. the messages menu doesnt have messages ordered by last one received, you have to scroll down to find them in an arbitrary and senseless order; in inventory tab ordering items by, let's say, dps have no permanence so next time you open the menu you have to order the items again
accessibility options are lacking to say the least, increasing text size only increases the subtitle text, not the text of the entire UI. there's flashing lights that have actively caused at least one reviewer a major seizure
AI is so simplistic it belongs to the PS2 era, npcs will not leave their spawn area to fight you so if you have a tech sniper and the ping power you get at the beginning of the game that's it, you can kill absolutely everything in the entire map from a safe spot. the police spawning behind you is just unforgivable and you know the worst part? if we keep killing police for a number of minutes they simply stop spawning and your wanted level disappears. yes, just like that, no reinforcements or max tac, no police vehicles of any kind, no difficulty scaling, they just stop spawning if you kill enough of them. you can even kill bosses from safe spots and they will literally stand still. whoever was in charge of the AI in this game should not work in the games industry.
the "living, breathing world" was said by someone who doesnt understand what that means, shops dont close depending on the time of day, there arent random events like police chases, muggings, gang wars, groups of fans following a celeb, npc's following an itinerary or anything of the sort, you wont even see a single boat running if you go to the marina or smugglers running from militech at the border and the most baffling of all, no one ever places a hit on your head so there's no enemy bounty hunters that track you down and try to kill you. there are no random events at all and no timed events either.
implicit content. no one noticed there's bus stops and buses? one side mission even tells you to go to a bus depot , the doors of the buses there have no collision so you can enter and check them out from the inside, they are fully detailed, so if there's fully detailed buses, and bus stops, why there's not a single bus running in the city?
we never meet any other character a fixer has given a job to. V never asks to the fixer in every region how they got his/her number and they give V jobs without ever meeting him/her. and dont get me started on gas stations. several things are just implied, what happened to "show dont tell".
missing content. factions have no weight whatsoever, you can kill 1000 goons from a faction and their leader will still call you and behave like you're their best friend, that means there's no faction progression and stance.
there's no consequences for anyone's actions, killing the second most important fixer in the city? nah you can walk right past their pals and no one will react meaning there's no character behavioral flags, start a shooting in your building? neighbors still say hi and shops will sell stuff to you like you baked them cookies,
getting to landmarks? [turn back, there's nothing for you here...yet], that happens near the rocket, near the oil fields to the north, near the top of biggest trash heap at the landfill and who knows where else, there's just huge parts of the city you cant even get close to, the map is kind of a lie if you think about it, how many sections of it are inaccessible or just empty? 50% 60%?
Where's MaxTac and Trauma Team? i have only seen TT in a few street corners as a static display and ONE shuttle that lands and lifts off again and again at the docks. as for MaxTac i have seen them only once in a side mission and you could not shoot them and were impervious to explosions. neither of these extremely important groups are present gameplay-wise.
substance over style. most of the hair styles, clothing and, way more importantly, cyberware the NPCs use are forbidden for the player, you cannot install anything but a few cosmetic level mods on your face when creating the character and change your arms later on for meaningless arm upgrade no one uses because they are laughably weak (ok gorilla arms are strong). so, how about letting me actually have an arm or leg that looks robotic? how about wearing those things would make us weaker to electricity attacks? that's how an rpg should react after all, and an entire city and we dont even get a damn hair stylist or tattoo parlor? it's almost cringe worthy that the devs thought this was ok.
all of these things? they are not bugs or glitches, they are design decisions. this is not how you create an open world and much less a 'living breathing' one. even watch dogs legion has a vastly superior open world and it's just a ubisoft game, but they do have npcs with schedules (once you recruit them) and ethnic and sociopolitical differences depending on where they live and what's their job, even their gear will change depending on those factors. CDPR has given us a game that follows a systems design plan from 2010 and CDPR has gone to absolutely zero effort into updating it for what has ultimately been a PS5/Xbox SeriesX release title.
they have touted the "wake up samurai, we have a city to burn" line for a while, well maybe it's time we woke up too. this game cannot be salvaged by only patching the bugs and CDPR needs to own what they have done. "we failed to see the signs" they said.
Well this is an unacceptable.
