I had a similar "it's great I don't get what people are talking about" experience, only I was running it on lesser hardware than yours: 4GB GTX 970, 12-core i7-5820k, 32GB ram. I ran into a handful of bugs that were funny but not really disruptive (e.g. some dude's corpse floating behind a car as I was on the highway) and otherwise had a blast.

Nonetheless, it didn't really feel finished, y'know? That part wore on me, and I think is what undermined my enjoyment the most. It really was released too early.

[–] Wrench@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Ran it on a 980ti, i7 4770k, 32GB ram at release. It certainly struggled at parts, but overall decent experience. And that was a pretty outdated rig at that point.

People just threw a tantrum. There were fewer serious bugs than Skyrim, which got all around glowing reviews. People have claimed the hype was why their expectations were so high, but as someone who wasn't even planning on playing it for a couple years until it was gifted to me, it was a decent game that had some areas of obvious improvement. Definitely a worthy first attempt at a GTA kind of game, and its a damn shame the gaming community chose it to be the meme pinata for the year.

[–] theragu40@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Nonetheless, it didn't really feel finished, y'know? That part wore on me, and I think is what undermined my enjoyment the most. It really was released too early.

The performance issues seem to be what every article and blog post focuses on because it's the easy thing to talk about, but I think this right here is what the actual biggest issue was and the real reason people shat on the game.

I didn't hate it by any means. And I, like you, ran it without issue. I just sort of lost interest because it was janky and super unpolished. Like I was playing an early access game. It wasn't big bugs as in the game breaking and not running. It was just lots of little annoyance that felt unfinished or half conceived, or like they didn't undergo full play testing.

The massive performance issues experienced by some just compounded those issues that existed even when it did run perfectly well.

[–] Questy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

This was totally out for me. It ran ok on my setup, but it was a shit game. It randomly generated traffic when you turned your back. AI for NPCs was often barely functional. Numerous build options seemed either broken or just untested. Itemization was boring and poorly balanced. Vehicles handled like crap in a game with a car collecting activity. The crime system was so undeveloped it felt like it was a joke from the Devs with police spawning in a bowl of rice to bust a cap.

Anyways, I played about 20 hours and realized the game wasn't finished or feature complete, and absolutely wasn't what had been advertised. I refunded, but I'm watching feedback now and may buy again if the game is closer to it's original sales pitch.