Night City may be the "City of Dreams," but these issues may have players wishing to conduct their business elsewhere.
While nearly every issue presented here has been changed as of Patch 2.0 due to the game's free gameplay overhauls, the following remain on Eighth-Gen consoles.
- The game's version of the Wanted Meter is implemented in such a way that it's both unenjoyable and breaks immersion. How it works here can be summed up in two steps: you commit a crime which is reported, then the police immediately spawn right out of thin air and start shooting you up. Even in a society where everything is connected online, it strains the suspension of disbelief when it takes only five seconds or so to go from you robbing someone, jaywalking, or any crime of any severity to a horde of police officers turning you into cybernetic Swiss cheese from behind. And don't try to be clever and commit crimes in some isolated corner of Night City to see if it takes longer for the cops to arrive. They're programed to be masters of Offscreen Teleportation wherever you're not looking, so they'll always spawn as a horde right behind you, even if it's physically impossible (such as spawning in each other). See
it for yourself. The icing on the cake is that they can appear as soon as your crime is reported, but after the shootout starts? Go ahead, just walk around the corner of the building you're next to, and watch as they somehow lose the ability to track your exact location from around the world. Scarily Competent Tracker one moment, Police Are Useless the next.- Even worse? The game has no pursuit mechanic, meaning that the game just spawns a lot of cops on-foot instead of the usual Wide-Open Sandbox way of rushing squad cars and vans. A modder found out later that such a mechanic exists, but was left unimplemented. The pursuit mechanic would make a proper appearance in Update 2.0, along with the above issue being fixed by having patrols visible on radar looking for you if you commit crime against innocents or the NCPD.
- The system was overhauled around Patch 1.5; now, the first level of alert will only spawn a relatively weak combat drone and turn all preexisting officers on the map hostile. Raising the meter further will spawn increasingly dangerous NCPD forces who will actively pursue V, but originating from a much further distance from the player than before.
- The game's combat feedback. In combat, the player character can go from full health to dead in literal seconds from enemies, with no indication of low health such as a pulsing screen. Unless you watch the health meter like a hawk, expect to die randomly and quickly in combat.
- Updates would eventually add better feedback for getting hit and being at low health, but this does little to resolve V's overall squishiness.
- This issue isn't helped by the damage calculations which were revealed before Patch 1.3, where enemies would gain notably more health than V as the game went on. Meaning V in the end game, even with all health based upgrades is less than 10% of the basic enemies health sometimes. This is apparent most with in grenades which are meant to do notable damage to enemies, so they can one shot V even at full health, with the only counter measure being taking the perk that nullifies V being damaged by their own grenades even as of 1.6.1 in November 2022.
- Before Patch 1.3, The game's minimap doesn't dezoom when you're in a car, as it would in most other similar games, which means that you will very often be told to turn too late to do it with the speed at which you're going. In Patch 1.3, which launched in mid-August 2021, it does zoom out, but now occasionally flickers the map information off the screen momentarily.
- The game's kill animations when finishing off an enemy with a strong melee attack. Most of them simply break the flow of melee combat, but the Mantis Blades are worst, having a prolonged animation that leaves V completely immobile and defenseless, easily resulting in death if it triggers near other enemies.
- Despite what one would assume, stealth headshots are not a guaranteed one-hit kill. Even if one were to invest multiple tech skills to boost stealth criticals and equip weaponry and attachments designed for stealth builds (including silencers), whether or not a headshot will actually land a critical and whether that critical will instantly kill an enemy or just mildly annoy them and cause them to set off the alarm is down to complete luck. This ironically leads to Intelligence being the best attribute to invest in for stealth players, as quickhacks and breach protocols offer much more reliable methods of evading security and incapacitating guards. By comparison, a lot of the stealth perks are either situational gimmicks, aren't particularly useful, or are available at the minimum level and thus require no investment in terms of attribute points.
- The alarm system itself is particularly despised: as soon as you alert one enemy, all enemies in the area are instantly aware of your exact location at all times. While it is justified by the setting (and is something the player can do themselves with the Ping quickhack), it means that a single slip-up in stealth (or an attempted kill not doing enough damage) necessitates an immediate reload or a shootout. That the only ways to prevent enemies from alarming everyone or to undo alarm states is through quickhacks further cements the actual stealth-based perks as Useless Useful Skills. The 1.3 patch adjusts how quickly a character is noticed before an alarm (with the pre-1.3 version applying only to Hard Mode), but still doesn't change how the alarm system itself works.
- The inability to check from afar what cyberware each Ripperdoc has on offer. Finally saved up enough money to install that kickass legendary Cyberdeck? Have fun finding the one among dozens of Ripperdocs who stocks it. They aren't even labeled on the map with a name one could memorize, leaving you no choice but to visit one after the other in person until you find what you're looking for. It also makes comparing different cyberware versions from different manufacturers pretty tedious since you're practically forced to write down their unique stats on a sheet of paper, or look them up online.
- Enemy quickhacks — in particular, Overheat. The game does not give a thorough explanation of what causes enemies to hack and Overheat V, or how to even stop it. This led to many, many confused players not understanding why they're taking Damage Over Time even when they're ducking behind cover. Even once a player does know what to do, however, that is only a marginal improvement, because knowing how to stop it is one thing, and doing it is another. The only way to stop a quickhack is to either get close to or kill the enemy that started the quickhack, which you can discover by scanning. Sounds simple, except that they are usually the hardest enemies to reach or shoot at (particularly on harder difficulties) and often, you'll have far more immediate problems running at you. Not helping matters is that enemy quickhacks are so sparse in variety. Enemies can locate your exact position or overheat your implants until you burst into flames, but so far that's it. As of Patch 1.5, which came out in Feburary 2022, they added some element of counter measures, such as being able to shut off cameras or killing the person that the netrunner is using as line of sight on you, will end the hack without V being hurt.
- Getting a Legendary-tier item of clothing or weapon can either make or break the player who relies on it, due to randomized mod slots. These slots can range from one-to-four per item, and the fewer the mod slots, the worse (generally) the item will be, particularly in the instance of armor mods, some of which are so unbalanced that they make most of the perks associated with the leveling system / the actual stats of the supposed "Legendary" item worthless in comparison. In cases where the player knows where a Legendary item is, they are generally advised to go Save Scumming until they get the item with four mod slots, at which point they pack on the best mods per game (or swap them out for something better). To say this broke the challenge in the game was an understatement, particularly when CD Projekt stated in the patch notes for the 1.1 patch that they were looking to take steps to stop players from Save Scumming. As of 1.5 they've effectively have it set in a way that save scumming will no longer work.
- Making matters worse is that there is a hidden, unlisted mod system that counterbalances the number of mods a player gets on an item through a random roll — what the player doesn't get as an open modslot is filled with a "junk" mod called "Me-Thrill", which has inconsequential stats and can never be removed by the player. As a result, the player could find a "Legendary" item that turns out to be completely worthless if it has only one slot, due to being filled with unseen junk mods that can't be removed by any means (attempting to do so in a save editor causes in-game errors and crashes).
- No longer relevant for apparel items as of Patch 1.5; their slots are no longer randomly determined, and any item which lacks a slots found on comparable equipment will instead have innate and unique bonuses not available via mods.
- The game offers absolutely no means to illuminate dark areas - no flashlight, not even some sort of night vision upgrade for V's eye implants, and the optic scanner does jack-shit as well. Not even turning up ray-tracing in graphical settings can help. There aren't too many instances of actual darkness, but whenever you come across one of them it's annoying as hell to literally not see a thing unless you crank up the gamma all the way to the maximum... and even then it can be tough going, depending on the quality of your monitor.
- Collectibles, even unique ones, in the All Foods and Konpeki Plaza missions can easily be lost due to poor lighting.
- The first two missions of Phantom Liberty questline (exclusive to ninth-gen consoles and PC) have more Bottomless Pits than the other parts of Night City combined, and with such illumination system, these are bound to ensure any player can flatline themselves any second by accident or recklessness.
- For a gun-oriented player, it could get highly frustrating that the game does not have toggle aim, only hold aim.
- Despite Johnny Silverhand having a unique blue/yellow tinted UI/HUD in the few segments where players play as him, many players are disappointed on how there is no option to change the HUD color.
- Certain enemies, primarily boss encounters, can only lose a fixed percentage of their health from any given attack. While this does prevent the player from being able to cheese every fight with a weapon like the Comrade's Hammer which can be modified to deal enough damage to otherwise one-shot any given enemy, it does lead to issues like some enemies seemingly inexplicably being able to tank several sniper shots to the face.
- One that was introduced with the 2.0 update is citizen vigilantes. If you get into a firefight in crowded areas, there's a certain chance that random pedestrians nearby will pull out a gun and start shooting at you. This sucks because, obviously, someone's shooting at you, but unlike with gangoons you can't retaliate without attracting the NCPD's attention, forcing you to either flee the scene or contend with a rapidly escalating wanted level. While it's quite immersive that everyone and their dog in Night City is packing heat, it's just plain annoying gameplay-wise when some rando leeroy's your battle plan this way.
- A couple actions are mapped on Q and can't be remapped at all, which can be annoying for PC gamers using AZERTY-based keyboards (France, parts of Belgium and North Africa) since the equivalent of WADS keys for movements is ZQDS. Most of those issues are anecdotal (A-D shortcuts in the character creation menu, but the issue merely results in usable keys mapped on non-intuitive positions without actual input conflict, and the same actions can be performed with the mouse), but it also has a more direct impact on stealth gameplay: when carrying a body, Q is also the key to drop the body, which makes the "move left" action impossible to use without wasting time. Another of the non-remappable actions is hitting Z to change the current objective followed for quests feature several objectives at the same time; on AZERTY keyboards Z is the key to move forward, which makes following the GPS in multiple objectives quests really annoying (especially if you need to drive through the city and the objectives aren't at the same place at all) since the followed objective constantly changes because moving forward is by far the most common and basic action of the game.
- 2.1 version added a radio usable outside of vehicles. On PC, its shortkey is Z, which results in switching current quest objective also turning on/off the radio at random. Fortunately, the radio shortkey is remappable.
