Caffeinated Otter

I jumped into the game for the first time knowing basically nothing about the game itself (avoided 1.0 because of a lot of what you mention in here) and similarly have been really enjoying a lot of the game but occasionally come across something that reminds me of why I avoided it, which leads to my enjoyment of the game feeling like a guilty pleasure. I didn't even know that some of the original story was rewritten/re-recorded!

as a wiser consumer, i see the situation like this:

I sat in a restaurant, saw the description and image of a delicious looking pizza and ordered it. The pizza came out a slice at a time - at first with half-baked dough and missing most of the toppings described in the menu, but as each slice came out individually it got closer and closer to being an adequate slice until, on the final slice, it's the delicious junk food i wanted in the first place.

but pizzas aren't supposed to be served one slice at a time, and certainly not in varying states of completeness between each slice. i should have been served the whole ass pizza when it was good and ready, and i should have been served the pizza i saw and read in the menu. if i took all those slices and put em on a plate, i'd be insane to say i had a great pizza when there are slices unbaked and under-dressed.

that being said, i'm absolutely one of the goobers who's raving about that last slice, because i finally have the game i was anticipating since the teaser came out ten fuckin years ago. i desperately wanted a first-person action RPG that didn't have a fantasy setting, which also had an actual role-playing experience and not just a slapped-together upgrade tree. and now that i have it, 10 years later, im kinda going nuts over it. im like a kid excitedly shoveling a bowl of ice cream into my mouth after i had to suffer through eating the veggies.

and even then, we don't have flying cars so they still didn't use as much pizza sauce as they should have.

...and if you were wondering i did write this while i was hungry

There's a lot of feeling of "this is the game it should have been on launch" in my time with 2.0/PL, because combat doesn't feel like a chore any more and levelling up has more meaning.

Except even that can't wipe away issues with the presentation of the world, the story, the core of what you actually do in the game. It's easy to feel like a murder tourist in Night City, despite V having lived there from anywhere between six months to their entire life.

The game's creative vision of cyberpunk is pure bougie power fantasy, unconstrained by grime and everyday necessity except as set dressing and costume. At a certain point you've gotten so personally powerful it becomes trivial to murder anybody you like and get away with it, amass a fortune, play with all the fancy toys and fast cars as you please, and buy yourself a swanky top-class apartment. An inevitable conclusion of it being a freeform open world game in a somewhat GTA-ish mould, I suppose, and yet...

Even if I forget the horrors of its production (and this article was a welcome reminder of those) the experience of playing 2077 will still, ultimately, feel hollow to me in a way that something like Shadowrun: Dragonfall didn't.

I never thought it about that way before, but your observation about never worrying about making rent was a real "...huh." moment for me.

"it was made unethically" is the one enduring thing that makes me feel less at ease about my plans to buy it on a sale.

No amount of patches will remove the crunch or the lies or the constant stupid date moving.

I've been having a similar reaction to Cyberpunk's rehabilitation, but through the lens of CD Projekt Red's labor abuses. Is everybody forgetting the multiple separate instances of crunch that went into producing the initial of that game, even when they told everyone they weren't going to crunch again, swearsies? How at least one of those crunch sessions involved work hours comparable to a fucking labor camp - a worrying thing for Red Dead Redemption 2 to have normalized? The levels of crunch developers demand from their workers on live service games like Fortnite? To my knowledge we haven't heard anything about the working conditions at CD Projekt Red since Cyberpunk 2077, and good reason to believe they haven't changed at all. There is a distinct possibility that they've produced these patches through the same levels of crunch they used to produce the base game. Given that, CD Projekt Red could be interpreting all the "Cyberpunk is good now" discourse as a sign that crunch culture pays out - but only if you're smart enough to keep quiet about it.