I started it. So far it's a mixed experience.
- The character creator is disappointing, you can barely change the appearance. You have a few presets and then choose from a few preset noses and jaw shapes, that's about it, no sliders of any kind everything is just presets, so hard to do anything special. The skin tone and most color choices are very limited, IDK why. Seems strange. I thought I'll spend an hour with the character creator, instead I finished in less than 10 minutes, and the end result is meh at best. You can't even change the body type, height, weight, things like that.
- The graphics seems good at first glance, but the more I look at it the worse it gets. The NPCs all look like working Joe-s from Alien Isolation. They all seem like rubber dolls.
- I think the game maxes out graphics no matter what hardware you have as it choose ultra everything for me as well. The only setting it didn't max out was RT, it set that to Ultra, and there is a "psycho" setting above that. DLSS was set to AUTO, but I quickly changed that to Balanced, it runs well now, but I think I'll change it to quality, as everything seems too blurry now Idk. what is the actual resolution for the balanced setting but it's definitely too low for me.
- The opening sequences are weak, no use betaing around the bush, this is not what I expected. It does nothing for me so far. But at least that means it doesn't make me hate V either. That's a step up from Witcher.
- Bugs? so far I saw no graphicsal glitches, no pop-in whatsoever, everything is fine on this front.
- What I've noticed however is that the difficulty setting does nothing. Easy, Normal, Very Hard are all exactly the same. I've tried all three. Maybe the enemies are more active on very hard, they move around more, but they do the same damage and take the same amount to take down.
- Speaking of which, they are ****ing bullet sponge damnit, WHY? CDPR, WHY?
- I could easily quit the game after 90 minutes, that is not a good sign, I expected to be lost in it until it's the middle of the night.
So those are my first impressions.
RE: The Opening
I started as Corp and I actually thought it was pretty good, but the whole sequence ended rather abruptly. I would have rather liked to see that scenario played out more. Seems like CDPR wasn't really interested in fully fleshing out your character's background and just wanted to thrust you into the main story.
RE: The Difficulty
Interesting. I started out on Hard, so I have no comparison to make. If this is true then I can imagine Easy being pretty frustrating.
RE: Bullet Sponges
This is an RPG, so I would not expect to enemies to go down in a single headshot for example. Enemies that can be grappled from sneak still can be killed or subdued in one hit, though.
RE: Quitting Early
I felt the same way after the Corp intro ended so abruptly because there really isn't much going on when you're thrust into Act I. This is a big RPG, though, so I'm sure it will require more time to get interesting. Similarly, it took me coming back and restarting the original Mass Effect 6 or 7 times before I really got into it, and now the original trilogy is one of my favorite game series ever.
Reading around forums a bit it seems this game takes advantage of multiple cores well, anyone confirm?
Seems that way. When I peaked it looked like load was being pretty evenly distributed across all 8 cores on my 9900K.