"I ran out of things to do, how have you enjoyed the game for so long?"
My relevant statistics:
More than 1,000 hours played between several completed and uncompleted playthroughs. Throughout the whole of it mostly 2 builds have been played fully; not all the endings have been triggered and I have not purchased and/or unlocked all cars, apartments, and quests, much less secrets.
Since we live in the era of inefficacy of long-form posts, I guess I'll produce brief examples to make my point:
- I mostly walk the city. Long ago I turned off the minimap and other HUD non-essentials, and decided to learn and enjoy the city. I drive with first-person camera.
- I don't use the map and/or journal as a checklist to complete all jobs, gigs, NCPD calls and the such; I prefer to focus in a couple while exploring curiously and slowing things down. I often walk into encounters organically and later investigate and reflect on what was seemingly happening in the area, that is, what it says about the people involved and the status quo of society.
- One time while walking City Center, a man jumped out of one of the corporate buildings and fell right in front of me; that made me remember that while exploring the H9 megabuilding I got to see a couple of middle to low level corpos asleep on the cocktail tables by the vending machines, seemingly exhausted. In my Night City experience, those two events are connected and constitute symptoms of the exhausted "struggling middle-tier", working 16-hour days while entitled to 3 vacation days a year.
- In my personal lore, the reason there are no pedestrian routes toward Watson from City Center responds to the same reason some corporate buildings create a sort of fortress around latter: after Arasaka took control of most of the industries and zoning around Watson's waterfront, seeking to gain access to the Pacific, they decided to let the district die, probably severing or not bothering with any pedestrian routes from City Center and blocking the unpleasant view of the remains.
Similar to reading a book, if you engage with the game slowly and allow yourself to process the events and struggles of it, your imagination will start to fill in gaps and create stories of its own, making Night City personal to you. You won't be thinking about robotically completing what's listed in the journal, and the surprises of the game will fully surprise you. That very deliberate Bladerunner reference took me completely off guard the first time, imagine that! Also, the find around David Martinez's building.
The reason the written web in Night City is so bare that it's comically embarrassing? In my personal lore: Tik-Tok, other similar short-form content platforms, and the emergence of BDs, practically killed the written word; most in Night City are not good writers, readers, nor well spoken as a consequence of fried attention spans. The exception to the rule are the Nomads, since we know they are mostly home schooled.
Go out there and savor this game.