(People pointed out that the city is dead because NPCs don’t have daily routines/cycles and they are dumb)
The issue is mainly that they (and the city overall) don’t really react in a way that has been established by open world city games since like… GTA3?
NPCs didn’t have a range of reactions to aggression or being bumped, they wouldn’t start fights, some of the seated ones wouldn’t even run away when gunfire goes off nearby they’d just stay seated and scream. The police system was obviously hellishly bad with cops just teleporting in to fight you, no chase/escape gameplay, no real anything.
The sandbox basically fails to deliver standard features of the open world city sandbox that have existed in every open world city game for 15 years.
The story content is good, and plays really well. The issue is that the world and interacting with it functionally feels like a diorama that you’re not supposed to touch. Like a background in a movie where the walls will fall over if you touch them.
Compare to how the world interacts with the player in GTA5 or RDR2 and it’s massively underwhelming, which is what people were expecting in terms of quality and polish. It’s a real shame because the game is gorgeous and tonnes of effort clearly went into its world and story. I personally have some other issues with it, like the “punk” aspect not really being present because half the studio are far-right PiS voters but it’s a Polish studio so I expected that. Trigger really demonstrated how this franchise should look when you handle it from the properly left-wing “punk” angle that the cyberpunk genre is supposed to have, fully committing with no both-sides or confusion about it.