Just finished a 9 hours and 30 mins session with just one pause (first time I've done this since... well I can't remember). I'm character Level 5 now. First impressions were simple: this game is very well crafted, there's a lot of attention to details, the environments are incredible. But for now I'm very tired and I'll just point at the issues I've experienced since the reviewers out there (especially from GameSpot's review) made it sound like it was a complete catastrophe of a game.
And it's not. However, I did experience a few bugs and glitches.
First though, about performance on a GTX 1080 (non-Ti).
I play at 1440p, everything set to High, with the exception of Local Shadows to Medium. I only disabled Film Grain and Motion Blur though (personal tastes). I thought that the game was going to be a slide show, but to my surprise I can actually get 30 FPS out of it (remember, it's 1440p). There's some places where it goes up a bit higher to around 33 to maybe 35 FPS marks, and some places it goes to 26 or 27. But the average is just right on the 30 FPS mark.
For now, it's enjoyable (with 30 FPS) and it suits my Hacker / Cyberware style just fine. I don't have to engage in huge gunfights with lots of action at once all the time that way. Once I do get my hands on a 3080, and if the game's performance does go up a lot more (to 50+ if not 60+) then I will probably try a different play style that would benefit from a faster response on everything I do. So maybe something like Melee with a lot of dodging involved and fast movements. I wouldn't do that at 30 FPS I think.
Now, the issues I've seen. There's a good number (that I've noticed anyway) but most of them are either minor / annoyances or even if they're "clearly showing" they don't disturb the gameplay too much; with the sole exception of one of them and I'll get to it:
1) Floating NPCs / various environmental objects or clutter, or floating weapons after a fight.
2) Spawning crowd NPCs (just a few, and doesn't happen often though) out of thin air right in front of me as I just walk around on the streets. I play the game on my Samsung SSD, so the in-game data streaming should be occurring as intended. However, I did set the crowd density setting to High, I believe, they may still have to do some more optimizations for their crowd system.
3) Interactible objects with the 'cube' icon (the white one, usually) that cannot actually be picked up / aren't 'highlighted' when approaching. Be it on the ground, or on a table in a bar, some objects just can't be picked up regardless which angle or proximity you're trying it from. But so far it wasn't anything related to quests, so it's not game-breaking in any way.
4) The 'T' key used to make a call to specific NPCs to converse with them on specific subjects. Well, some of those convos bugged out on me. I had one with Jackie where his character icon just disappeared during one such conversation, but he kept talking. After his part of the convo was done, he waited for me (unseen by me then), and I couldn't reply back to him, and my option to leave the conversation was gone in the process. I had to save on the spot and re-load the game for that one to get fixed. But the game re-load fixed it.
5) In regular NPC conversations (I.E. just approaching and starting to talk by pressing 'F' for a quest or anything else) I've had several instances of "Sentence Skipping". That one was reported in a bunch of reviews out there and yes I confirm, it does happen. In those situations the NPC you'd be talking to would start a sentence, speak 2 or 3 words of it but then he or she would then completely and suddenly skip to the middle or the end of a completely different sentence as part of the end (or near the end) of that conversation. That bug is probably my most hated one so far. It happened I'd say about 5 or 6 times (even though in a 9 hours session it's not that much, it does annoy me nonetheless every time since I have to re-load the nearest save point every time and re-do the convo that bugged out until it plays entirely without a skip).
6) Now as much as the game is filled up with polish (no pun intended) and I am truly enjoying it. I have to say... the combat A.I. (at least so far from what I've played within the Watson District on various types of quests and fighting different gangs and bandits) is pretty much just as dumb as most modern FPS games. The worst offender is when using a Stealth approach. I've had a few situations where I Hacked one thug out of a group of say 4 or 5 others nearby (all within each other's range and view) just chilling there.
I'd hack one guy to make him blind for a few seconds, and while he's panicking about the situation the others around him don't make a single move. Another one is when I left the corpse of one guy I stealth-killed from behind where he died, eventually to be spotted by another patrolling goon. The goon that spotted the corpse stays near the body, looks around, then goes "Bah, must be nothing", Bethesda-games style. But what made me laugh after that part was when he walked back to the others who were just leaning against a wall not too far away and he suddenly entered red alert mode and yelled something like "We lost one!" and he immediately ran back at the corpse that he had left behind nonchalantly about 10 seconds earlier.
Which is probably my biggest concern right now. In terms purely on game-play, having my 'Stealth Immersion' broken by non-responsive or just plain dumb A.I. moments like that does - actually - impede on my will to continue on playing in a Stealthy or even 'Hacky' way with Cyberware. Now, fortunately, Cyberware is useful beyond just hacking individual enemies. But it's not without its deep faults. Without exaggerating, I'd say so far this is the worst part of the game (A.I. and how it can, or rather cannot feasibly respond well or intelligently enough to you playing in a never-seen style from a distance). The problem isn't in the character's capabilities to play that way, really. It's the A.I. coders on the CP2077 team whom probably didn't have enough time (believe it or not) to properly give the A.I. enough (or more capable) routines and ways to react to a human player that would go about killing them from a street away by hacking their brains out. The real issues arise when doing that against a group of enemy, not against a single one; it's when they're in a group that things take a funny turn rather than making you immersed in the moment because they'd plausibly react to your infiltration and hacking attempts, and attacks.
So, to be frank, by hour 9 in my game now I mostly just hack 1 enemy in a group to reveal the others around (with the "Ping" addon) and that's about it. Once I ping and then locate them all, I then just move around a bit carefully to Tag them one by one Far Cry style and I just take them down with a gunfight (and with grenades sometimes, I do like them in this game). The full 100% stealth approach is probably going to be a chore, or a comedy for a lot out there.
Now, with all this said, I must add:
The game though, is 100% stable. It does not crash, and it does not freeze on me, not once. I've read some reviews where it was claimed the game crashed a couple of times. Well, not for me anyway and I played 9h 32mins exactly, pretty much straight (I did reload saved games to fix some bugs but I didn't actually quit the game and it kept on running for that long).
Annnnnnd that's about it, I think. I might be forgetting a few minor annoyances but I AM 100% absolutely enjoying the game so far. I'll probably do a proper 'review' of my own once I finish it or maybe I'll wait in a few months until I've seen most of what it can offer out of 3 playthroughs (and maybe one DLC by the time I get there). For now I'm consuming this game in a very slow, exploration-focused way right now. I'm just experiencing the relief of years of waiting. This is a very impressive game, and I have no real 'tough' disappointment out of it so far that would hit me so hard I'd go like "Huh ok so it's not that good after all". Not at all. It's very fun, I'm fully enjoying my time with it, but it does have some issues here and there, about 2 or 3 of them I would have preferred not having seen, but I can deal with them.