I think there’s so much more you can do with the setting and the sandbox though. The basics of a city sandbox involve the police, fire and ambulance response to problems in the city.
There should be private fire crews, and they should compete with each other. Fires that break out should have multiple private fire companies come out to them and compete for putting out the fire. This should turn into a disaster obviously because they just shoot the shit out of each other.
Ambulance teams should obviously be Trauma Team. The scene where you hand over the woman from the bathtub to Trauma Team should have been the way they work ALWAYS. They should be scary heavily geared medics that don’t fuck around about killing you to save some corpo you’ve injured, they should show up before the police in cases of corpos because Trauma Team are more efficient than the cops, and not over-stretched.
The cops should have a real chase system, and show significantly more signs of being overstretched in the city.
Areas of the world should react realistically to player inputs, rather than feeling like a diorama they should feel like living spaces.
If these had been nailed properly along with modtools the modscene for the game could have been better than Skyrim. Especially with all the locked doors everywhere for modders to add content with.
On the non-technical side of things. I find CDPR’s cyberpunk to be a little confused. Sometimes it doesn’t remember that this world is hell and it goes to “coool futureeeee”, effectively having the aesthetic trappings of the genre but trying to pretend that the world is good and likeable. Trigger’s show on the other hand is never confused about the world, it’s a living hell that nobody should ever admire or think is cool and it never strays from that. This isn’t really very surprising given that everyone working at Trigger is a communist though lmao. You can see the difference between half of CDPR being right wing who actually admire this future libertarian hell city vs Trigger’s studio full of commies.