That’s funny, I would point put the amazing gameplay in particular as their no. 1 selling point, if I had to choose anything. But the discussion what’s good and what’s bad aside, they just didn’t deliver on their promises.
I was fed the story of a GTA contender. A life-sim where your choices matter, starting with your origin story, which was supposed to already have great impact. And what does reality look like? Well, your origin story gets you a different tutorial mission and you get a few extra dialog options that do nothing. Your character always behaves exactly the same outside of that and it changes nothing about the story. It’s hardly even referenced by other characters at all, something Mass Effect and Dragon Age did better forever ago. The one big difference I noticed is that Jackie matters even less to you as corpo, which makes all the emotional stuff feel even more out of place and awkward, since you lose the offrenda mission. Hurray.
As for life-sim aspects, you can eat in some select few cut scenes, otherwise eating is useless and doesn’t even come with generic animations. You cannot even eat your useless food at a stall in the city or have a drink at the countless bars in the game just for fun. Except for cutscenes and in your, save for the wardrobe, useless apartment of course. You can also take a useless shower, or wait in bed instead of literally anywhere else. Wow.
You can randomly date a select few characters out of nowhere by choosing a random dialogue option. At least this yields you an almost sex-scene and a bonus quest… Followed by optional, awkward staring in your apartment and no further impact at all. Funnily enough your gender has a greater impact on the game than your backstory that way.
NPCs are generally dumb and you can’t really interact much with them at all. Police is dumb and easily outsmarted as well, but also always punishes you by death for anything. MaxTac is really tough actually and beating them yields you… Nothing! Nothing at all.
You do get a couple of choices throughout the story, but do they really change all that much? I would argue no, they don’t. Most of the time they cause some characters you barely know to live or die. Not the really important ones of course! We need those and there aren’t that many. I think one of the most interesting interactions in the entire game is the one with the ranom Natwatch guy, because you can’t really forsee the consequences for once.
Then there are a couple of different endings, some of which are actually hard to find. I think in retrospective, they are the main thing, besides the very varied gameplay, offering replay-value. The thing is, you don’t need to replay the game to see them all.
Is Cyberpunk trash? No, of course not, I’ve had my fair share of fun. I’m actually in my third playthrough to do liberty city, because everyone says it’s amazing. As for the main game only, I can’t help but be disappointed by the countless things this game doesn’t do. Including many low hanging fruits.
I’m a little torn on your comment, because om the one hand you are right and on the other these lawsuits have nothing to do with the designs or art style at all.