Back in the day, CDPR used to be the kind of company, where people would tell you to just buy their stuff if the genre appealed to you, since it was so well-made and company politics so fair, supporting them was a total no-brainer.
Well, I guess the company took over the shoddy business practices of their competition, hired utterly incompetent and visionless asshats (with no personal ties to videogaming as a hobby), who did the ridiculous "We'll be the next WoW/GTA/Fortnite"-shtick as if that hadn't been a recipe for failure for more than a decade by now.
Now they made a shoddy mainstream-targeted cash-in title, that pissed away all the good reputation CDPR had amongst a very, very dedicated niche of fans. This is the kind of thing that can sink a company like this and I almost hope it does happen, given how much of a fuckup this game has turned out to be.
It kinda reminds me of the space-game X4. The company behind that franchise made a really weird title that did away with so many of the core mechanics of the games before it and it appeared seriously dumbed down. At some point, people started digging into the game's code and found out that everything in there suggests that the game was originally planned to be a console title, that got scrapped halfway through, retooled into being a PC game and then released to milk some of the sunk developement costs back out of the fans.
The fans were none too pleased about it.
But one thing that kinda gets me about Cyberpunk is how bad the art direction is. There's a lot of decent stuff, but the cars, houses etc. just look so terrible. Like, it's way too cluttered and doesn't look cyberpunk at all.
It should have gone for a retro-futurism look based on how 80s cyberpunk depicted such settings.
There should have been way more dark, rainy nights and neon lights.