This. TW3 was also my game of the year 2015 (by a large margin), but people tend to ascribe a ton of things to it that it generally doesn't have. Most notably, its open world is paper thin but is held up largely by the incredible work of the environmental artists, who made sure that every little nook and cranny seems like it has a story. What TW3 did really well was that environmental aesthetic and the ambient feeling of the game coupled with quests that were often quite simplistic (Go here, then go here, then kill monster, maybe get a moral dilemma) but tended to have quite a lot of writing done to them to make them feel like more then simple fetch quests. The combat system was never better then mediocre, the controls were clumsy and most of the map markers were absolutely pointless (all them sunken treasures in Skellige), to the point that it makes the average Ubi game feel measured and meaningful with its map markers.trunkage said:
From what Cyberpunk 2077 is showing so far, CDPR seems to be in over their heads. The gameplay they've shown seems floaty and detached, with bullet sponge enemies and incredibly unbalanced skill trees (if a Netrunner can murder entire rooms without ever being put at risk, why would you ever use a gun and risk dying? What happens if a Netrunner can't murderize the entire room with hacking, will they be forced to slug it out with guns that barely do damage?). The dialogue ranges from decent to cringe ("We didn't need this cocksucking attention!"?) and there are some serious question regarding the text and subtext of how CDPR is handling representation and the actual themes of the genre.
It is worth remembering that TW3 was a rather simple game, all things considered. You either hit people to death or you got a conversation to avoid hitting people to death. It occasionally offered multiple resolutions to a quest, but rarely did it have more then one way to get to the fork in the quest, since Geralt hit things or talked to things. Cyberpunk is promising at least 3 different ways to solve every quest (hacking, sneaking, shooting, often talking) and that's something they've never even come close to doing before. I'm not saying they'll fail, but I think it is worth it to temper expectations, especially since the game has been in development for at least 6 years and CDPR hasn't tried anything as ambitious before.
