[mey]

It is a great game, but marketed incorrectly. It isn't an open world game. It is a narrative driven looter shooter with amazing visuals. It isn't the game I wanted. I have zero desire the replay it (and you can't really play past the 'end'). It is worth the price of admission IF you have a computer to run it, which is a significant hurdle.

Interestingly I played Psychonauts 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 back to back, both at times felt like playing a movie rendered into video game form.

[mjevans]

Any game with voiced dialogue is either going to have one single story, a bunch of little threads that don't interact much, or both. Some games might give you a bit of wiggle room to get most or all of the content in a single playthrough; but usually that's going to be a fairly rigid solution since any slack time translates to a slowed narrative pace for casual players. It will likely look like a movie, but with some choose your own adventure cutting-room-floor edits and maybe player controlled pacing.

[mey]

The latest Elder scrolls games, Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row, all had voiced dialogue and didn't feel as "on rails" as Cyberpunk did. None of those games are recent.

The way the core narrative is structured is one of the core problems with Cyberpunk, the games mcguffin implying an artificial time constraint to drive the narrative to resolution. Except driving the narrative to resolution ends the game.

[mjevans]

Those games all spent their budgets better and had better planning. They were still on rails, just the core story was better planned and there were many more fulfilling side quests (extra threads) that stood on their own for players to organically experience. TES is infamous for players wandering off and almost entirely ignoring the primary story to instead enjoy all of the dungeons and side quests.