To start off, Cyberpunk 2077.
>Has stealth but the enemies are bullet sponges (because of the loot system) and none of the enemy groups in the game are designed around stealth
>Had a perk that allowed you to throw knives, which are semi rare, and you lost them forever, until they patched it so it's just a cooldown. Knives were the only other option for stealth besides silenced revolvers and rifles
>has character creation but hardly ever displays your stuff because you're always in first person.
>Random missions on the street can have enemies who randomly kill you in one shot with a peashooter because the encounters are leveled without considering where the player at a certain level has access, which is EVERYWHERE after the first act is over.
>Despite having enemies way over your level, you don't get loot that matches their power if you defeat them, as the loot you get is leveled to YOU and anything above your level if you DO find it in the world is unable to be used (There are fixed drops), arbitrarily.
>Iconic (unique and powerful gear) weapons are also leveled to you, so if you don't spec into crafting they're all useless unless you find them at level 50, and they'll quickly get outpaced by shit on the street.
>Melee is an option, but none of the perks you get do anything but increase your damage. Building into it with cyberware doesn't add much.
>The harder difficulties are not the way to actually play the game, because it ups the enemy health, damage and armor, so if you fight any group early on, you'll get one shotted often.
>You can't get chased by police in a car because they didn't program that shit in
>The design in general is an example of the devs wanting you to have options, but the options conflict against eachother in design (stealth doesn't work because enemies are sponges who don't die from sneak attacks or have good AI, loot system doesn't work because it doesn't commit or allow the player to get ahead, the crime system does not work because it was underdeveloped and the AI is shit)
Sounds to me like it was a case of developer conflict. They didn't know what the fuck to focus on. They wanted it to be Borderlands, but also have stealth. They wanted you to be powerful, but the enemy balance lists compensate by being bullshit and random, they want you to be blocked off from stuff for "reputation reasons" so you have incentive to move up, which exacerbates the random difficulty, they wanted to create a living, breathing world, but they don't even work on the fucking AI?
Many indie games that do less, do better then this. And that's not a compliment to indies. And on top of that they pull the same AAA tricks in the story (walkie talkie scenes, slow setpiece scenes like hacking and braindances, etc).
I think they committed the cardinal sin of focusing on cutscenes and environment FIRST, rather then the game system and game loops themselves, because the cut content vibe of the story missions reek of that. The flathead being a story piece rather then a gadget, the whole scale back on the hacking system, removal of climbing with mantis blades, removal of fluff pieces like the stalls, the extremely overdone yet empty world, horrible optimization, it reeks of that shit. They're updating it but they aren't fixing it. The whole game is a disasterpiece from start to finish, literally all the choices in development they made were ill-thought out.
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