Heck, what all does Cyberpunk 2077 actually add to the genre? And again, other games have done what it purported to be doing.
to be fair, nothing they promised (initially at least) was in any form really groundbreaking or revolutionary, just a lot of "more". afterwards it became overblown hype based on OMG WITCHER 3 BEST GAME EVER CP2077 BE GOTYAY. desperately trying to live up to it or keeping investors happy didn't help.
if you go with the list
@Ruin posted, let's look at it objectively what it would mean technically and in design terms (not talking about what they ultimately shat out):
- world reacting to you? more complex AI and flags, but nothing mindblowing. "individual npc life" is a nice bulletpoint on the feature list, but in the end would just mean npcs instead of (literally) walking from a to b, they pop up in more places with a different routine, reacting based on whatever flag you set via quests or other triggers. for example: you kill too many cops, it ups your "notoriety" (hidden or visible, in the end it's just a stat), your face show up on wanted posters when it hits a certain theshold, npcs (logically) now know your face and start screaming when they see you. that's the most basic version, that's a "believable real world simulation". if you want to go further you tie missions and important npcs to it, see below.
- meaningful decisions and dialog? just more voicelines and replaced nps. lifepaths would fall under that too (which would just be another flag anyway), the deeper and more complex you'd would want to go, the more expensive it would be, but that's pretty much it. this is the biggest chunk that would eat budget, so you could expect it would be scaled back in some form. example: you kill one dude, he never pops up again. so everything after that would've have to be written (and voiced) with that in mind, reflecting the new state. if that dude was a random mook, it wouldn't have much effect. if that dude was johnny silverhand, you just made most of keanu's fee irrelevant. worse, you need an equal replacement, essentially doubling what you'd need to spend. you get where I'm going with this. still, with clever writing you can alleviate some of it, and not everybody replays every branch, so you could get away with re-using parts. heck even if people notice it they usually don't expect something completely different each time, as long as you don't go full retard with your lazyness, see rachni queen in mass effect.
- "rpg mechanics" - first of all, this is CDPR catering to the biggest mainstream tards and journos, that shit would've been neutered at some point. remember you're dealing with people who don't upgrade their guns in mass effect and base reviews on that. but even if we roll with it, this would just be numbers under the hood, similar to "do you use an axe or a sword?", which would play a different animation with a different sound. this is just another instance of "more": how many different weapons (with different animations and sounds), how many different gadget asf.
you can go wild with skills and shit (and I think they tried in some regard), but you'd still need to balance it (or at least try), to prevent people from simply steamrolling through anything etc. which is boring af (although, now that I think about it might be necessary for journalists). again, this would just be a question of how many and how diverse you want it to be. you can have dozens of skill trees, but if they're effectively all "+1 damage", what's the point. you'd probably still have some influencers jerking themselves off over all those choices tho.
- customization? just more assets, plain and simple. lot of games these days shower you with different decals, textures, models etc, same thing, nothing new.
that's why I didn't believe it when they announced all kinds of shit, and was never hyped about it. maybe that's just me being spoiled since I know how it works under the hood.
however even I didn't expect such a disaster, because as you said most of it has been done before, so all they had to do is replicate it in an acceptable form and improve on that where they can and it's economically feasible.
heck with a better story and little more polish people probably wouldn't have minded the rest at all, since that would also work as a form of distraction. of course you'll always have people who make funny videos of glitches and shortcomings, but it wouldn't become it's own meme if the rest holds up. same for graphics (features, not aesthetics), for most that comes after all the stuff the game would need and is really only "important" for bullshots and companies trying to sell you new hardware.
it's the entire reason retards kept saying "what's taking so long it's been 8 fucking years!" when the game didn't even actually start development until a year after Witcher 3. there maybe, just maybe, had been less of an incentive to push the thing out in a broken state if people weren't getting impatient.
it's a glorified ad, but you're dealing with console retards back in 2012 when games were quite not expected to regularly take 6 years to make after being "revealed"
the main culprit was mismanagement tho, even if they would've revealed it after witcher 3 was done that's still 5 years, and with cd projekt not really having any income sources (gog doesn't really make money afaik) they had to release at some point, not matter how much people whine or whatever mess they cooked up.
