is cyberpunk 2077 good now?

From what I've seen, people who focus on things like "bullet sponginess" and "god tier" generally don't like it. People who don't care as much about stuff like that and look for worldbuilding and story love it.
Personally, I think people who are looking for perfect gameplay are looking at the wrong things in cyberpunk. If you want an awesome shooter, go play overwatch or something, you don't play Cyberpunk because it has perfect gameplay, you play it because of the world they built.
- 'perfect worldbuilding' is amazing and im not going to attack a book for not having combat features but when combat is intended to be such a large feature in the game youre being too easy on the devs and doing yourself a disservice by saying that is just isnt a big feature / a concern at all, youre treating this like a walking simulator. expecting a game with such large emphasis on its combat to have balanced combat isnt perfection - it's the bare minimum. it's good you enjoyed it but admittedly the bar you have is very low
  
  Personally I found the combat as fun and balanced as can be expected in a game where power scaling is not directly tied to progress. If you just fuck around doing side quests and farming loot for 20 hours, it's going to feel super easy, and if you try to blitz the story and run early game stuff then enemies will feel like bullet sponges. That's just a mechanic endemic to the open world rpg genre. My first playthrough I did side missions as I stumbled across them on my way through the story, and the combat felt pretty balanced. Second time I went much more methodically and ended up cruising through story missions like nobody's business.
- Doesn't seem that long ago that people ripped into BioShock Infinite for having bad gameplay despite the story and world being interesting.
  A game should have good gameplay as its #1 priority. The story can be the core, but gameplay has to exist in service to it. If mediocre gameplay is the wall that sits between interesting story and world, then the experience suffers as a result.
- That's an interesting take. I haven't played Cyberpunk, but now I know to stay away because I only play Destiny 2 (also a pretty lore-heavy game) for the feel and the sound effects.
- so it's shit
  
  yes, my point proven exactly. If you go in hyper critical looking for things wrong with it, you're going to find things wrong with it. It's so much fun to focus on those things, refuse to play it (or buy then return after 2 hours saying it's shit), and then continue to complain online.
  I've played 3 full playthroughs since release, and as someone who doesn't even know what bullet sponginess is - I've had a blast with the game. Being hyper critical and having ultra high expectations is a sure fire way to make sure you enjoy a lot less in life.
  
  It's an above average game. If you want a faced paced shooter it's not what you are looking for.. if you are looking for a game with a lively world, interesting characters and story telling, with some shooting attached, this game is awesome
  Easily an 8/10 in it's current state. If you just want to shoot stuff and nothing else play something like doom eternal.
  
  It’s only shit if you suck at games. The game plays fine. Could it be improved? Sure. Is it shit? No.

I'm about 6 hours in on the dlc, I had a level 37 cyberdeck build I used going into it, playing on normal difficulty...I'm pretty godly, but the cyberdeck builds have always been OP. The rebalanced skill trees encourage you to max out 2-3 stats and dump the rest. All in all, the game finally feels like what was promised at launch. I respecced into a couple other build types just to try them out, I REALLY enjoy the combat with the blades, I felt like a futuristic cyber samurai. All in all, I'm really enjoying it, crank up the difficulty if you want more of a challenge for sure. Not sure if it was worth a total of $90 us, and a three year wait after release for a completed game, but so far I'm really liking it. The dlc gives me escape from New York crossed with new Vegas vibes. Try it again with the free update and decide from there, if you like the gameplay, then totally get phantom liberty!
- Idk if I would recommend it at $90, but right now the base game and expansion are bundled for $60.70 on steam.
  It sucks for the pre-order customers that what they really got was 3 years of early access, but for someone jumping in right now, that's a solid deal.
  
  Damn, that actually kind of pisses me off...I got the gog version because I've been a supporter of theirs for like 10 years. At 60.70 it's definitely worth it

In my opinion it's not, the gameplay is still terrible and the writing nothing special.
- Lol you've been downvoted for sharing your opinion after specifically being asked to do so. Also not a single person at the time I write this has provided a reason for why the game is good in their opinion. Great thread!
  
  Here's my opinion: The story is good and the characters are great. I really do feel a connection with the characters and empathise with them. The world feels real but also cinematic. I recall a time where I found myself amongst oil derrigs and there was fog all around lit up with a blue tinge. It was amazing, beautiful, and scary because I was expecting someone to jump out at any time and start firing but it was just me, wandering through the mud, alone at midnight.
  I never fast travel, I always walk or drive to my next location, and it's a great experience every time. If I'm driving there is kickass music to listen to, and if I'm walking I see the NPCs going about their daily sidewalk vomit.
  I added mods to up the damage, so a fight feels very dangerous. I can kill in a second with my sword, but I can also die in a second from a few bullets. Fights don't usually last very long but they are intense.
  It's definitely a great game (now) and worth the time. It does well at immersion, at always having another thing to do, at having meaningful choices, ad at depicting the world.
  
  I guess we are Reddit now, only one opinion is accepted on any subject.
- Personally I enjoyed the gameplay and found the writing to be so so with some really good moments and some awkward and awful ones (River hitting on a female V, I was with Judy and was frosty with him at every opportunity and he still went on as if I was leading him on. Like MF I could not have been clearer.)
  
  That River thing is just peak social commentary
  
  your example is so funny cause if i asked my female friends rhatd be accurate lol
  
  I'm still cut that the only male romance option for female V is a cop, and a creep on top of it

I've played through it twice after the sale around the release of Edgerunners. Had a great time. I loved the story and I got completely absorbed into the world. I just played after the 2.0 updated and the game seems even more fun now, at least at high level. So yeah, it's good now and it was good a year ago. There's still some bugs every now and then, but most of them are just "charming" bugs like cars getting launched, spawning in wrong places, etc. Taste is personal though, maybe RPG diehards or something might not like it.

honestly in my opinion, at least on PC, cyberpunks always been pretty good, now it's better
- Bro the first PC version was especially dogshit
  
  This was true for so many people but somehow I never saw a bug on PC Cyberpunk.
  
  I didn't have any problems with it

I played it originally upon release and my biggest problem with the game was that none of the RPG elements mattered. It also felt more like a linear campaign with various irrelevant side missions.
Is it still pretty much the same in that regard?
- Phantom Liberty is more along what you want, that story branches nicely. The base game is very linear.
- Depends. If you mean in gameplay terms, no, there's been some changes. All the perks were reworked, and not only all function correctly, they all have a tangiable effect on your build, and visiting a ripper doc is now a requirement instead of something you do once or twice.
  If you mean in level design terms, like are more missions open ended like the Maelstrom one in the beginning? Yeah, it's the pretty much the same. I don't think that'll be addressed in anything other than the DLC tbh.
- cant imagine that changed, thats an issue beyond one code can fix

Yes, it finally lost Early Access
- C77 lost it when the edgerunner DLC came out

Hell yeah. In my top ten games. It was good at 1.6 as well, 2.0 adds a whole new stack of cool shit though.
- As a netrunner, cyberdeck overclock feels amazing.
  Basically once youtr out of RAM for quickhacks, you can spend hp instead, 10 hp for each RAM cost.
  So you can play along the knive's edge against a large group of enemies, where one or two more control quickhacks might put you right at deaths door, but give you a chance to heal back before they start shooting at you again.
  I'm also a fan of the level scaling. In 1.6 sometimes I would come across early content with a late game character, and just run across them haphazardly 1-shot beheading anyone close to me. It's funny once, but gets boring revisiting old content. Night city should feel dangerous.
  
  Yeah, many people seem upset by the scaling level but my goodness the game was dull before. Once you were levelled everyone died so quickly.
  I'm actually getting punished for mistakes now, which is awesome. I really prefer staying in the end game and it's just so much better now. For anyone worried about not feeling like an OP monster, you still are. It's just actually engaging now.
  
  what happened 1.6

I love it now, everything feels punchy because you're not gated around finding new weapons every level. I'm sticking almost exclusively with the iconics that can be upgraded, but as far as I can tell the only difference between generic weapons is the tier they're in, the damage appears to be the same no matter what level you find the weapon at. Some other changes:
Armor is tied primarily to cyberware now, which has a limited capacity based on level and a handful of perks that increase the cap.
Cyberware has impactful changes to playstyle, granting new bonuses like higher melee attack speed, increased RAM, or restoring a portion of stamina on kill
Perks have drastically increased effects that often come with conditions that encourage active playstyles (e.g. 50% faster grenade recharge if you have no charges left)
Healing items and grenades have a pool of charges rather than being single-use.
Natural healing is faster, but healing items are less immediately accessible (No more sucking down inhalers in the middle of a firefight)
All the Skills have been consolidated into just five that correspond roughly to the five attributes' associated weapons, and they level quickly. Every five levels grants a bonus associated with the attribute (Netrunning (Quickhacks/Smart Weapons) increases max RAM and RAM recharge speed, for example)
Weapon upgrades are no longer gated by Tech
Clothes are almost entirely cosmetic. Any that grant mechanical benefits (Armored vests, for example) can be worn under outfits comprised of any clothing you have in your closet.
- I love it now, everything feels punchy because you're not gated around finding new weapons every level
  just explain this all in more detail please
  
  So pre 2.0, all the weapons, armor, cyberware, etc. had a level assigned to them in addition to the rarity that determined how big the numbers were, and it forced you to go through your vendor trash each time on the off chance that the numbers were better on any particular weapon you found. Now, every weapon of a particular type has the same parameters depending on rarity tier (white through gold) so if you have a higher tier of the same weapon, it's explicitly, if marginally better, and this keeps you from having to sort through 20-odd weapons every time you go sell, which drastically speeds up the process. Even more so if you stick with the unique iconic weapons, which can be upgraded with materials up to tier 5.
  As a side-effect of this, the marginal increases can't boost the legendary item's damage that much higher than the common rarity, so even the most common weapons still deal adequate damage, so enemies aren't spongy like they used to be.
- wait so what does tier determine weapon wise now and how does combat feel
  
  Each tier gives a marginal improvement over the last, but as far as I can tell there's only ten tiers (Five colors, each with a normal and '+' tier.) I can say combat feels pretty good with melee weapons, pistols/revolvers, shotguns, and grenades. I haven't tried the other weapons a whole lot but I imagine they feel just as good. Only thing that's a little weak maybe is Quickhacks, but even then I've got a few that will kill mooks outright.
- could you send me where you copy and pasted this from
  
  Trust me, you don't want to be in my brain.
  Seriously though, this is all my opinion/interpretation of how the game plays now vs in 2020.

God I hate that stuff. I remember playing The Division and doing tens of thousands of points of headshot damage after billions of bullets to those shotgun dudes who insta-kill you no matter where they shoot you.
- Doesn't really happen in Cyberpunk tbh, you become incredibly OP a few hours in. Unless you're somewhere where you really shouldn't be, getting a strong build going is very easy

It always had been good. It’s even better now
- I don't know about it always being good...Objectively, it launched in a very very rough state, regardless of the platform (my PC is not a cheap rig, still had numerous problems when i played). The recent patch ironed out a lot of the game's problems (tho the level scaling was a step backwards IMO, tho YMMV on that), and yeah, a part of me wants to give props to CDPR for fixing the screwup they themselves made....but I also feel nobody should be giving them props for meeting--and not all the way, mind you--an expectation they themselves set with their own pre release trailers, interviews, and the likes.
  Said it before, I'll say it again: they should've just gone the Baldur's Gate 3 route. Because we basically went from Beta, Early Access, to (arguably) the full release of this game in the 3 years it's been out.
- Genuinely delusional.

one of my friends, who is really nitpicky and had a really strong opinion on the former versions of the game told me it's good now. I myself can't play it, I have a 2010 era machine...

I started playing just before the Netflix show came out and I loved it, it quickly became one of my favorite open world car games, in the same tier as San Andreas and Sleeping Dogs.
By the end I became completely unstoppable, I played as a melee netrunner and it was insane. I didn't really mind because the story and world more than made up for it.
- Yes, great. Except that OP didn’t ask for that
  
  Glad you took the time to comment even though it seems like the meaning of what you were replying to didn't really go through.

Curious myself. I played it shortly after launch, and while the atory and the worldbuilding was really great, the gameplay was flawed due to the severe lack of polish.
I concluded back when the DLC was announced that the game deserved a revisit, especially now that I have a proper PC on which to run it, so here I am.

I played it when it first came out and returned it. With update 2.0 and the game on sale, I gave it another go.
I’m really enjoying the combat. I’ve built a character around Reflex and Cool, so my silenced pistol one shots standard enemies, and my throwing knives can one shot beefier guys so long as they’re not aware of me. I specced into Reflex for the dodge/air dodge mechanic.
Maybe on harder difficulties, the enemies become bullet sponges, but most targets die before I need to reload.

Well, your biggest issue is easily fixed by adjusting the difficulty...
I started playing again for 2.0 on hard, and most enemies went down with a single sniper headshot. The ones who didnt were the ones where they had a split health bar, so it was easy to tell if it would.
- play on too easy a difficultly and ai gets dumb as bricks and you become god, the problem is balancing.
  
  I mean, hard isn't low difficulty...
  I haven't tried the hardest, but I doubt normal enemies take more than two headshots with a sniper.

Might be a bit too early to be the judge of balancing since it has been just a few days. But for now all I can say is it looks promising.

Dude, mods exist. You can change the game to feel however you like.
- Lmao. You realize that not everyone can mod, like if they're playing on a console? Also, how is modding better balance into a game the job of the consumer who already paid $60-70 for a product? Not to mention how modern modding (love it though I do) has game companies actually getting away with pushing out a subpar product at a premium price, and then actually getting DEFENDED for it (like right now).
  The absolute state of modern gaming.
  
  I forgot about consoles. Also I never said it was OK for companies to shit out a worse product for modders to fix. Inevitably they have to though because of level scaling. That seems to be the status quo.
- xbox...
  
  Ohhhhhhh