The player character isn't more vocal than the first game; you're mostly just forgetting the few lines of dialogue said after every single strong enemy where you call out that one is there, a screeching sound effect plays, and your character says something else after it's dead. Same with bosses. The only thing new about how much the PC talks is when playing coop. Your character now actively banters with the others. In the previous game, he'd say things were gross or weird or just general commentary to specific commentary on world events you got. It's why voice choice was even a thing in the first game to choose what he sounds like as a self insert.
There's way more dialogue and overt "lore" in the game, though, that doesn't require you to have played Chronos prior. For anyone confused, the Destroyer is Chronos' PC and the Wanderer is Remnant 1's PC. It's not Dark Souls cryptic shit but overt dialogue, books and item descriptions telling you about how fucked the world you're currently in is.
The game averages towards less lampshade hanging cringe inducing millennial writing but your character choices in dialogue skews towards it at times.
The diversity isn't actually new, either. The rainbow coalition you see are all returning from the first game and its DLC barring niggerific sassy black woman with "why wypipo" dialogue. But nigger no legs was the same guy as the first. Nigger is the diversity hire for Ace's role.
N'erud is 10/10 and second only to Rhom.
Survival mode needs to return.
Edit: Also, yeah, they removed a bunch of hairstyles for more diverse (read: nigger) ones and for women, they cut a bunch of longer ones for I can assume clipping but the male ones removed were the most white dude ones like an undercut.
And the callouts (where they say archer for ranged, flying for, well, flying enemies) for enemy types were in the previous games, too. I assume they thought people don't use voice chat (they don't) so would need the callouts or you marking with the emote thing.
It's simply more Remnant with actual classes instead of every build just being what armor, mods and amulets/rings you're running. The lack of armor bonuses sucked at first but is great now because I don't have to use one of three actual sets with good abilities and can fashionsouls it.
The upscaling is incredibly funny because it also makes the logo for the game jank out on the first boot with it enable because I think it's tiered to go FSR then XESS then DLSS based off of hardware detection so it just looks bad with the mostly static title screen just shimmering unnaturally.
