(Preface: I bought and installed the game after Patch 1.5 was released. This is also my honest opinion of the game in its current state.)

Let my begin this by saying: I was not one of the seemingly millions of people who were hyped for this game at launch. I thought the concept was really cool and had potential to be great but I never pre-ordered the game or set my expectations to over necessary levels like much of this fan base did before the game came out.

I saw that the game was on sale for half-off one day and purchased it in the hopes I could get $30 worth of fun out of it.

What I can say is that I got well over full-price in entertainment. I streamed my play-through with my friends on Discord and had a blast travelling the world of Night City and completing every side quest before picking my ending. This game suffers from the same issue many massively popular open-world RPG have (namely the Fallout and Elder Scrolls Series) today. For some, the game is quite unstable and will crash or have other weird visual or audio bugs that hinder their experience. Myself personally, I only ever witnessed a bad visual bug during the Judy companion quest line near the Dam. Were there funny glitches I saw along the way? Absolutely I have at least 10 clips on Discord of cars shooting up in the air due to weird collision and various NPCs acting dumb. Should that bother you? No. It's a massive open-world video game with a ton to do and much of your experience will not be this. Many of the issues that players have issues with run on either older, legacy saves of the game or come as side-effects of them modding the game. Playing through the game again with a fresh character will more than likely fix your issues. If not, check audio and graphics drivers. Those are known to also cause issues.

That being said, the only real gripe I have with the game is that there isn't many fun things to do besides quests. I would love this game to get a playable card game or video games you could play on a arcade machine or computer in the apartment.

Other than that, much of the negative feedback you'll see comes from those who consistently find satisfaction in bashing a dev team who has continuously attempted to make the game more playable and more fun for the fans who stuck around and stayed loyal to their game. It's admirable that they interact with little contests and free in-game goodies for those who keep playing this game (which people will complain about because they hate fun).

Do I think you should play this game if you are new?

Yes. Don't look at all the old, outdated ratings and just play it blind. It's pretty fun imo. (If you want to read reviews for it if you're that curious, just read through recent reviews. This game got review-bombed HARD).

Do I think a veteran player should give it a second chance?

Absolutely. This game isn't what it was two years ago. It was perfectly stable for me and I ended up having a load of fun playing everything.