The actual scripted portions of the game are great. But everything else was obviously unfinished. Redditors absolutely freaked out, disproportionately (though I wasn't trying to play it on a last-gen console, it's my understanding that the game barely functioned on those platforms). If the open-world aspects and the side quests had all been on the level of the scripted stuff it would've been the best game of the year. People have, correctly I feel, compared the game unfavorably to Red Dead Redemption 2, which manages to have a great scripted story but also a load of fun open-world stuff to do (though, in my opinion, that game suffers from some of the usual design aspects of a rockstar game, which keeps it behind Witcher 3 as my favorite story-driven game of the decade).

Personally, I felt the setting was really cool, but was again best realized in the scripted portions of the game, not the free-roam content. I hope they make another game in the setting just so I can see more of it.

But I, as a player of games, really only cares about story. I don't really give a shit about mechanics or gameplay, so the more a game is like reading a book or watching a movie the more I'll like it, and the more a game is like an arcade game the less I'm going to care about it.

With that said I think the biggest flaw of the game is V. They should've made V a character in the world in the way Geralt was. Someone with a set personality, someone who would only ever make a certain set of decisions. One of the things that the Witcher 3 excels at are that in situations where the player is confronted with a choice, everything you can choose to do is ultimately in character for Geralt. But I felt like 2077 didn't always know who V was. But it wasn't like the player had sandbox-esque roleplaying options either. V was a character with a personality, kinda, but it was a weak, poorly defined personality.

I loved the outline of the story I got when I played. The sad, dying corpo woman who fell from grace and found a family on the streets who has to choose between her ambition and her desire for meaningful human connection. Beautiful. But then I wanted to see more of her early corpo lifestyle and I wanted to see a lot more of her time with Jackie's family. And of course they couldn't do that because V wasn't a set character, there are three starting options. They not gonna make like six hours of unique content for each start. And then later they're hamstringed because how V would react to Jackie's lifestyle/family is massively dependent on their background. It's only after a year in the life of street mercenary that the player gets to see V again because that's the same for all the starting paths and that shapes who V is as a character for the rest of the game. Sure, there are unique dialogue choices depending on your starting path at some points of the game, but that wasn't enough. And I'm aware that if V had been their own character then the story I got might not have even been possible, but that's the price to pay for a better, more human story.

It's such a different beast from something like Disco Elysium or even New Vegas that I'd hesitate to make a comparison. I dunno. When I think of 2077 I think of the characters and their stories first before I think of anything else. But when I think about Disco Elysium I think about the mood and the broader political and philosophical themes before I think of the actual plot or the characters. Disco Elysium is very dreamy. And with New Vegas I think about the crazy-ass plot and playing all the factions against each other but I don't really think about the characters, the focus isn't on them the way it is in 2077.