He is right though - game looks plain, boring and flat. And DX12 flop don't help either.
Right. I'll take the games which will look as boring as this any day.
Because it doesn't look like a game that needs so much memory. I have eyes and seen enough of it. I don't need to be a programmer to form an opinion. Games like Witcher 3, GTAV and Dying Light make more intense use of textures (both in quality and quantity) and work in 2GB cards at max settings just fine.
It does look like a game which needs at least 4GBs.
And it does work on a 2GB cards - with textures set to low.
Also, what does the release date have to do with anything? You are saying that even games that should have low system requirements must be forced to use more recourses than needed just to be in sync with "the times" or something? I guess Undertale had to require a 970 too then, despite it's visuals.
I'm sorry, are we talking about Undertale? Or are we talking about a port of an AAA release from one of current gen consoles?
Plain looking or not is highly subjective. I agree though. The DX12 features I expected to impress me are completely missing. There's probably a reason to why MS released this silently. From the looks of it it runs like crap based on the visual features we're given. Especially considering the high requirements. I'm all for successive steps in power required as long as that power is put to good use, but this game doesn't seem to do anything so advanced that it would take a a 980Ti to max it out with a stable 60+fps. Barely keeping 60fps for this game with todays high-end specs seems low.
Then your expectations from DX12 were unrealistic. DX11.3 allow a dev to access the same features that DX12 has, the difference is that with DX12 you can achieve a better performance for a couple of reasons.
And again, I fail to see any "high requirements" in a game which is showing 80 fps on a 980Ti in 2560x1440 maxed out. This isn't high, this is pretty low to be honest. A game with high requirements won't be playable on one 980Ti maxed out in this resolution.
Who said anything about 60fps? It doesn't even run at a stable 30.
The game doesn't run stable anywhere because it has severe frame pacing issues right now. This is something which hopefully will be fixed with a patch.