I put in some quality time in the wee hours this morning, and, yeah, while everyone looks stiff and mannequin like, that's just part of the problem.
Quite a lot of the quests I picked off just aren't that engaging. You can get away with that if your character models are better, or you can get away with lackluster character models if the plot is super detailed and engaging.
But having both is a problem.
That being said, I'm still 30+ hours in and on track to marry Andreja so there is something to it regardless.
Get mission, fast travel to location, get waylaid by spacers/enemies on the way to the objective, kill everyone, achieve objective, fast travel back.
Everything in Night City feels excellent and handcrafted. It's so dense, and that's what you want in an RPG map. Starfield by design is so sparse, not only because it's in space but because everything is disconnected and tiny.
Sadly, cyberpunk is far from being a rpg. Try different chatting lines ? They add a line as answer, then answer the same as others. There is a pair of exceptions, but you always end in bottlenecks.
That's a pretty minor complaint in the grand scheme of things. I always assume there's going to be limits when the protagonist is voiced.
The 2.0 talent system is really fun to play with even if the dialogue options are limited. I would say all the internal systems attached with xp and leveling are much better in 2077 than in Starfield where they were literally all nerfed into obsolescence.
The issue with this bottlenecking is it affects everything. You have only one mission for reach the end. You can't find another way. And whatever how you play, doesnt affect how people reacts to you. It's more a fps than an arpg.
So would you argue that Mass Effect is an FPS trilogy given the ending-o-matic color machine?
"just skip past the important introductions and character building and your start of the journey with a cutscene and then have people call you to give you jobs that you haven't met in game and don't care about because you have no connection other than that cutscene"
