I waited this one out, dabbling in it on and off but unwilling to dive in to a full playthrough until it ran and looked like I wanted it to. Got one great playthrough on a mildly modded 1.63 and made sure to finish it before 2.0 dropped. Was fantastic. I'll come back when I can play Phantom Liberty and a 2.x playthrough the way I want it to look and play. Currently the visual downgrades (street reflections borked, reduced saturation for neon, etc., and that's with RT Reconstruction mode!) and the lack of what I consider absolutely necessary mods (pretty much just Constant Rain and a temporal mod to make nights really long and days really short) mean I'll wait it out again.
In that case you are better off waiting for the "real" Cyberpunk which will be the sequel. I have now played CP2.0 for a few hours and here are my thoughts:
Audio
Wow. The sound engineers for the game don't get enough credit. What a phenomenal aural experience in Atmos with rear upwards firing speakers. Voices are crisp, music not over powering whilst ambient sound is high detailed and believable.
Perks, Clothes and Skills
All have been revamped and are much more logical now. I recommend a new play-through to wrap your head around and appreciate the changes. It's clear that CDPR have listened to feedback.
Driving and NPC
My first play through on launch day in 2020 was fine on XSX. I only encountered 3 or so bugs but neither were detrimental to gameplay. However, the behaviours and physics work much better now. Great ideas were there from day one but now it feels like Night City has undergone Q&A. Stunts when going berserk and into John Wick mode are really cool and I love the visual effect.
Graphics
When the game was release, we were in the hype cycle of next gen consoles. We were naive to believe that all games would run in native 4k, 120fps with ray tracing. hahaha 🤣🤣 Our expectations were too high.
The game hasn't changed much except that performance mode looks decent, less grainy and closer to Ray Tracing mode. The latter mode is useless. I have flicked back and forth but can't see any ray. Furthermore, once you are used to playing at 60fps over 2-3 years, it's difficult to go back. The game looks good but lacks visual pop - especially on a non-OLED Dolby Vision TV. It looks like a previous gen game, which is what it is!
Why I'm excited
This upgrade brings a closure to CP2077. Let's move forward towards the sequel. I think it will be a significantly better and more complete game because:
-It will be built using Unreal Engine 5 which has been debugged and proven to run will on XSX/PS5. Therefore the developers won't have to waste resources on developing a game engine, and can instead focus on art, game mechanics and hopefully online multiplayer.
-The team creating the sequel are based in the US instead Poland. This means, access to a greater pool of UE developers and they'll work in the same time zone as Xbox, Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD and Unreal.
-They have learned a lot from debugging and fixing CP2077 and have a flurry of mods and community feedback to inform the new game.
-CPDR won't be stretched thinly. The new game will likely developed for just three platforms, XSX, PS5 and Nvidia RTX all of which have been rolled out and are not in development. This is easier than developing for Xbox one, Xbox one X, Series X, PS4, PS4 Pro, PS5, Stadia and PC.