This game, it seems is very polarising. You either love it or hate it. I'm two hours in and trying my best to see past the jank and annoyances to find a path to love it. So what can I do to make the experience most enjoyable, I believe the real fun comes with unlocking a multi use class later in the game but I can't push through til that. I really want to love this and I see relative casuals with hundreds of hours of game time logged so I know there is a diamond under the rough with this one. 

What am I missing? What can I do to polish up the diamond or make it visible, covered in all this mud? 

What platform are you playing on? I've seen it's very heavy on the CPU with npcs popping up literally in front of your character, especially in towns

Ps5. Eh, I've played worse. It's very junky at it's core so the least of it's problems would be in that manner but yes, there is pop in of NPCs. It's not too jarring or off putting though.

@OP. The game has a certain feel to it and after another three hour session I now understand what it's going for and is definitely a step on from the infuriating jank of Dark Arisen which I gave up on after my third or foutlrth combat encounter. It's going for that slow paced, larger than life world that Skyrim and Bethesda games would give years ago, it perhaps takes it too far in some aspects. I'm left wondering is it really that emergent that it would cost this much jank, NPC's can die, quests are basically all radiant quests and everything just happens organically, large monster fights are insane so perhaps. I'll see with time.

It is very punishing though, you loose health even after reloading a save unless you reload a save where you rested at an Inn and it's quite difficult with slow progression, I've yet to unlock a new skill. There is definitely fun here, the last mission I did turned into a little adventure where I done some emergent quests and helped a few people along the way. I don't know how long that fun will last given the jank and time investment it takes to get some things done, the game really has to be taken at a slower pace and if you try to rush thing I'd imagine it'll be quite frustrating. 

Okay, I spent most of the day playing so since there was no replies I'll add to the thread myself with what I've found so far and let me add that this game is fun despite it's jank, Combat on melee jobs is fantastic and exploration is addicting, questing is cool and feels emergent although it's much of go from A to B type stuff. The general feel from the game is much better than the jank implies and feels much better to play after you get used to what it's doing. So what I've found so far that'll help the the main issues I ran into...

• You can buy a house during a quest that triggers in the first main city, a women will ask you to house sit and after a week she'll offer the house to you for 20k gold which is cheap considering Inns take 2k per night. This is invaluable. 
• You have a latern for dark areas, it's best to keep it on you. Night and dungeons are very dark. 
• There is a ring you can buy at the main blacksmith in the main city that helps with equip load and stanima issues. You can also eat a certain brightly lit bug found on trees for a very small increase. Keeping your load light effects stanima so unloading to your stash at an Inn, selling or sharing items with a pawns inventory is best done often. 
• Using oxcarts is invaluable, you can come across them on the main roads and they really help in a pinch even if they take you across the map, you'll find an oxcart at it's destination going back to the main city. Saved me having to reload at an Inn twice. You can use oxcarts to travel to a location if it happens to be between the destination and you're willing to wait. 
• You can well gain skills early, it just has to be done at the vocation center, there is no other progression system aside from this, some vocations have passives which I believe carry over to others, so it's good to level up a few and grab them. 
• You can enhance equipment at a blacksmith 
• Archer is best but not as much fun as melee
• It's best to take your time and just go with the flow and you'll fall into a pretty nice gameplay loop. 
• You find a graveyard in cities where you can revive dead pawns and NPCs so don't use the wakestones yourself.
• Fast travel stone are seemingly extremely rare so don't use it as tempting as it may be, save up a few first. I've only found two so far. 
• Gold is easily come by, buy new gear if you see it in shops cause not much drops in the world and when it does drop it's class specific so likely won't be equipable
• Make your main pawn a mage so it can heal you if you can't spell heal yourself, this is invaluable and very nessesary
• The visuals are improved if you can get as far away from your TV as possible, the fuzz isn't noticable to a distant. Push the couch back if you can. 

So far. Pretty excited by the game. There is something to people spending hundreds of hours in it l, indeed and the jank means very little once you adjust to the vibe of the game. Coming to this after Stellar Blade is jarring but the good VA and NPC dialogue is much more appreciated. 

As someone who loves the first. Stay away. Esp on consoles even after all the patches it has performance issues. The game is incomplete. The story sucks ass. Dark Arisen is a much better game. DD2 took one step forward and 5 steps back. If you can handle 7th gen graphics just play Dark Arisen instead. Better game overall. Even has the extra cool dungeon that the more enemies you kill the more likely Grim Reaper will appear and chases you like the Gauntlet series. Has a really fun and tough boss fight at the end of the dungeon. This is no ordinary dungeon it's super long and might give you vibes of soul games. Gameplay no but vibe in there is great. DD2 is piss easy. Enemies are stupid. Lack of variety. World is huge but uninteresting. DD: DA is smaller but more interesting.

I'm having quite a bit of fun. A lot of emergence. There is an insane amount of jank in Dark Arisen and painful quest like escorting the cart mission. I find this a step up, albeit the story isn't exactly grabbing me. It's serviceable but the general exploration is decent enough fun that it's carrying me through. I agree there is a LOT not to like here but since I've paid for it already and I'm having fun I might as well continue even if I get the impression I won't be completing this one. 

People seem to forget just how bad Dragons Dogma was when it released, like practically a broken game. If it released today, even with modern graphics it would get less than 5's from majour critics for it's brokenness alone. Dark Arisen only polishes it so much too, it's still jank as fuck. 

The vattle in the video below for example was a lot of fun but it's the small stuff that happens that creates a feeling of emergence like a harpy picking me up high into the air, dropping me and my pawn catching me to save me from death or throwing a rock at a dam to cause a flood to take down a large monster. Just the chaos of the battles too, is it worth the jank for this? Eh, Idk yet. It sure would be nice if it was more polished. 

It kind of suck loosing 45 minutes of gameplay because a few small enemies worse you down with a thousand paper cuts and there's no camp in sight but it gives stake to adventuring. The vibe of adventuring is something that even Bethesda can't get right these days and the only other game I can think of that hits it is Kingdom Come Deliverence. This is a slight breath of fresh air despite insane jank. 

I have not finished yet (I have 42hrs on Steam) but I really like Dragons Dogma 2, until now is a 9/10 for me, but the game have a poorly optimization and this is frustating asf (mainly in the city). I have a RTX 3070 and a Ryzen 5800x and the game use a lot of CPU, but when I watch stream and play the game at same time for example I just use 60-70% in the city for example, but I get just 35-65 fps in the first big city, when I'm outside of the city i get 60-80 fps.

Video Settings that I use in the game 

Display Mode: Full Screen

Screen Resolution: 2560 x 1440
Frame Rate - adaptative
VSync: Off
Dynamic Resolution: Off
DLSS Super Resolution: Quality
DLSS Nvidia Reflex Low Latency: On
Upscale Sharpness: 5
Ray Tracing: Off
Ambient Occlusion: SSAO
Anti-Aliasing: TAA
Screen Space Reflections: On
Mesh Quality: High
Texture Filtering: High
Texture Quality: High (2GB)
Grass/Tree Quality: High
Resource-Intence Effects Quality: High
Shadow Quality: Medium
Shadow Cache: On
Contact Shadows: On
Motion Blur: Off
Bloom: On
Depth of Field: On
Lens Flare: On
Lens Distortion: On (+chromatic aberration)
Subsurface Scattering: On

Do you have an FPS ticker on for games at all time? I mean, tracking it is cool but would you notice the drop if you didn't look at the numbers or is there noticable frame pacing? 

You're probably doing better than me. This is so far the worst looking PS5 game I've played and I've played some AA stuff. It's pretty terrible although I've only noticed frame drops in cutscenes which is where the graphics are most polished ao it makes sense I suppose. The worst thing is the insane amounts of fuss in performance mode but with distance from the TV it's not so much of an issue oh and of course NPCs just pop into existence in towns and the city. 

I only use Afterburner. About framepacing problems i have only in the first city.