Thinking about Keanu Reeves Presents: Intrusive Thought Simulator 2077. It's ambitious, large, and deeply deeply flawed. But I'm sure you know that already.
What I have done recently is installed Grand Theft Auto IV on my Steam Deck. And man, it's a breath of fresh air in comparison. Whatever you want to say about its particular brand of storytelling it is so much more successful at what it sets out to do.
Liberty City is fun to traverse or wander around, driving is interesting, Night City is barely able to put up an illusion of life.
CP2077 is clearly built to draw focus to the higher-fidelity scripted parts, you do a lot of searching the eyes of your comrades as they ponder the ethics of shoot gun at corpo, but it just makes the fact that they made the world as sprawling as they did feel pointless. You spend a good deal of time traversing it, and it’s boring. Driving sucks; your car handles like shit and none of the others are better than it.
GTA IV, a game from more than a decade prior, does a much better job of this. You can go back to GTA IV and still find an interesting thing to do with the driving mechanics alone. Walking in Night City sucks, you have a sprint which has a limit so large you're going to get tired IRL before your character does.
Nothing interesting ever happens on the way unless it’s a specific, scripted event. And most of those are “please shoot the cyberpsychos in this vacant lot on behalf of your mandatory cop friend”
I think I can see what CDPR were trying to aim for, but they clearly aimed way too high, and missed the mark by enough that their efforts were bested by games from generations prior.