Been playing this game for weeks. I completed it and then started a new game. The game’s story is excellent, but it absolutely does not justify the tedium it makes you endure to experience it. In a 40 minute sitting, I’d spend the entire thing simply having characters dialogue at me. What’s the point of the open world then? Car chases are scripted so that you don’t even have to fire a single shot. The enemies will just eventually blow up. 70% of dialogue choices are just for roleplay and don’t change a thing or make extremely minor changes. The combat and shootouts are mid.
Act 1 is a chore to get through on replay. There are so many touches they could have added to make it interactive. The Flathead robot mission… why not let us pilot the bot in first-person to do all the tasks, like a stealth minigame? I can think of a few games that let you do something similar. Instead, it is 20 or more steps that are essentially “look at this object and wait.”
The best part of the game for me was the middle, where the plot becomes more elaborate, evocative and the relationships with Judy, Panam, Johnny etc develop. But even there the game was navigating me through a seedy open world in order to show me glorified cutscene after cutscene. Then shootouts that were really nothing special.
Witcher 3 was dialogue heavy, nuanced and compelling. It had tedium, but I never felt like the open world was superficial or that the tedium overshadowed the rest of the game. Side tasks like Gwent or contracts were fun and absorbing. The most boring expositional bit was using Witcher sense to explore, but even then at least you were interacting with your surroundings more, not just sitting there being talked at.
Did anyone else feel this way?
im replaying the game in vr rn, usinf luke ross real vr mod. it bringsnonly barebones vr capabilities, you still need kbm or controller, but honestly, the open world complaint simply disintegrates in vr. a world this perfectly crafted is simply a joy in vr. since vr is generally slower, the dialogue parts also feel way less slow and tedious, and when modded appropriately difficult, you really start roleplaying to your charavters strength. starting off as a weak ass meatbag, having to stealth everything, chroming up more and more to the point where you go from dying in 4 shots to being able to go beserk bring a real sense of progression to it. currently modding via the new nexus app, as vortex doesnt work on linux, so i cant make a collection yet, but once i have it, i will definitely share it. i have 680 hours rn, 300 of them in vr (120ish i the current run) and i’m enjoying every minute of it