uh I'm a gamedev at my dayjob and I'm working on a game design mfa so ... I know? my favorite game is INSIDE and it's a total chore to play. But I think it has a LOT going on and is extremely interesting. OP is saying Cyberpunk is not fun -and- it has nothing going on intellectually -and- they played it all the way through twice? Really, that's a mixed set of signals. If you think it's not fun -and- it has nothing going on, why play it -twice-?
> the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined
really reads like "I liked it, but I'm ashamed to like it, so I'm going to say I didn't like it instead"
eh, I dunno. I used to do that, thinking that I "needed to get my money's worth", but I've started bailing on games if I'm not having fun after 2 or 3 hours and don't ever regret it. The way I look at it now is that paying for a game is like paying the price of admission to a museum. If I'm not liking the show on display, I'm not going to stay there for longer just to feel like I got my money's worth. Paying the price of admission isn't a promise of enjoyment.
but like, I'm not really trying to convince you of anything, I'm trying to get clarity on what you're saying, because your original comment is so ambiguous that it doesn't actually help me figure out whether or not I want to play Cyberpunk.
You got one answer, but I'd also suggest that someone might play a game out of spite. They might play it to check their experience ("maybe I was in a bad mood the first time"). Maybe all the coverage in the media made them feel like they needed to give the game a second chance. Maybe they wanted to see if the path or play style they chose was just a bad fit. Maybe they wanted to ensure they had enough data to back up their critique.
As someone who has spent years in the games industry, I strongly encourage you to take your players seriously and don't just assume you know better.
Factorio wasn't particularly fun for me and I couldn't stop playing that. That game really stressed me out and I was very relieved when I could set it aside.
honestly I found playing Cookie Clicker to be really transformative in terms of perceiving those situations. Ever since then, I look at games differently. The most recent example of this is Hades. I played that game very compulsively, and feel that most of the serotonin I was getting out of it was the result of operant conditioning, not something that I really like. That game has an absolutely perfectly designed reward loop, but I wasn't really enjoying playing it very much.