I love giant open-world games but my love for them comes at a price when on last-gen consoles. There is a reason why I tend to enjoy simpler games on a PC that reflect my love of gaming from days gone past and that is because of one very huge reason: I absolutely lose my mind over what I consider to be excessive loading times.
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Every time Cyberpunk loads it isn't nearly as long an amount of time as I think it is of course but at times it is around a full minute between scenes and every time after you die or move to another area. Thankfully, Cyberpunk isn't as of yet, plagued with cutscenes that I also hate and do not want, but the loading times drive me bananas and make me want to log out of the game.
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If you've played this game you have without question, been staring at this in the top right corner for a great deal of time, maybe 2077 seconds every couple of hours of gameplay and it is just maddening to me. I get it ok, the world is huge but I have a hard time believing that this process couldn't be streamlined a bit. One instance where I find this particularly irritating is when I die in a certain area and have to reload to my last quicksave. It takes the same amount of time as if I was moving to the other side of the map and while I am not a programmer, this doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me as though most of the resources would already be in memory and would need to just be reset. That is not the case with Cyberpunk though. It takes just as long to reload a game in the same area as if you were moving to a completely different area.
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I often wonder what sort of loading process they are using when you are driving from one end of the city to the other because at least so far, I have never encountered a loading phase during this part of the game, even though at some instances I will actually be traveling a greater distance than if i just used one of the quick travel terminals. How can the game load FASTER when I am currently using processing power to move from place to place than when the game only needs to show me a loading screen? I'm sure there is some sort of development reason why this is the case but seriously, this is something that needs to be worked on and it isn't an issue in other games I have played such as God of War.
I find myself getting frustrated any time that I have to travel to another part of town or even when I decide to skip the rest of a "ride along" screen - when you are in a car but not driving it - because skipping the rest of the ride can actually end up taking longer than just finishing the ride and this makes absolutely no sense to me.
For me, it doesn't matter how awesome the gameplay is in a particular game. When I am spending half of my gaming time starting a line that creeps across the top right I quickly lose interest in the story and the game overall.
I'm only 10% of the way through the game on "Street Punk" story mode and am already starting to eye up other games that aren't going to be plagued with this. Some people must just accept this part of gameplay and try to make excuses for the developers and say something like "if you want a world this big you have to accept load times!" If that is the case why doesn't this happen in other equally large open-world games then?
I'll keep playing this for now but I honestly can't imagine that I am going to tolerate this VERY LONG process especially if I end up getting to a tough boss fight or something where I am going to have to reload my game multiple times in the same spot.
It also could be because I am playing this on a regular PS4 and that is what is slowing down the process. I don't know because I have never seen this game played on a high end computer or a PS5.
It's frustrating though and I am not hardcore enough of a gamer to simply tolerate the long waits for the sake of the experience. I'm probably not alone in this.