Just finished playing Dragon's Dogma 2.
Massive disappointment.
This is not a sequel, it's a remaster. Exact same story points, same locations, same enemies. It's the same game, with overhauled graphics and a bit of class rebalancing, but essentially the same game.
The graphics on low settings look absolutely terrible. Like way worse than the first game, and worse than any game I've played in the last 30 years. Turning up the graphics only barely looks decent, but forces TAA which causes everything to get blurry any time the camera moves, literally hurting my eyes from the strain. Also many people with high-end rigs have reported terrible performance even on medium settings. This game is honestly emblematic of all that can and too frequently does go wrong with modern graphics technology.
Throughout the game, more than half of the large bosses have been cut, greatly reducing the variety. In the endgame the popular Everfall has been cut, replaced with a bullshit time-attack mode that offers far less content. It's just a lot less game than what we got the first time, even before the DLC.
Lots of crashing, quests bugging out and becoming impossible to complete, strict keybinding limitations, sloppy conversion of console GUI to PC. Every part of this game is lacking.
And at the core, the balance just feels off. Like I get new skills and I'm eager to try them out, I go out and find some monsters, line up my attack, only to have a pawn 1-shot the enemy before my attack can land. And then that happens again, and again. I finally find a boss that will stay alive long enough to test my skills on, and the boss chains status attacks that keep me completely disabled for the entire fight. Find another boss and actually use my skills, then the boss flies away before I can finish the job, leaving me with no loot. The whole time playing this game was frustrating, and never fun.
I loved the first game, but this abomination has done nothing but smirch it's legacy.