I have over 200 hours in the game from the first two weeks alone.
Finished it a couple of times, different endings.
What went wrong was that CDPR overpromised and went EA, Activision-blizzard on our rears to far more lethal degrees.
CDPR sold a lot of promises, and hyped the game up with features that never saw the light of day in the final release, and never came into existence in the following free patches. In september we will finally see an actual feature come into play - a risk that comes with adding too many cyberwares, which won’t be quite the same as cyberpsychosis, but it is one way to emulate some sort of consequence that the universe have.
Anyway, CDPR hyped the game up with false promises. That along with the stellar reputation they have gathered with the witcher series, created the heavy crapstorm that we saw.
Good reputation is difficult to build, but oh so easily destroyed, especially when your good reputation has cemented you as competent and trustworthy developers… and then you take that trust, and in CDPRs case it was intentionally so, and smashes it.
CDPR did not just develope a “bad” game. That is more easily forgiven. They outright lied to their customers for the sake of profit. Just look at the console versions. Setting aside the various features they promised through their gameplay trailers, they also said that the game was ready for the consoles.
Yeah… right.
At the end, I think what really went wrong was that the executives did not listen to their developers. Because if I remember correctly, the devs did warn the executives that the game was not ready, and the executives only pushing the release date back with a month at a time did more harm than it did good.
First push back should have been a year. Yes, it would also create a crapstorm, but not to the same extend as pushing it back two months, then another two months, then another one month.