Dragon's Dogma 2 took 12 years because "the stars really had to align" for the "massive amount of resources" an open-world RPG takes

gamesradar.com:

Dragon's Dogma 2's release is right around the corner, and given that it's launching over a decade after its predecessor, there's no doubt that plenty of us are excited to see what the sequel has in store. 

To be exact, Dragon's Dogma 2 will reach our screens nearly 12 years after the original. After all that time, no doubt a question on many of our minds is why it's taken so long for a sequel to materialise in the first place. In an interview with GamesRadar+ (via an interpreter), Dragon's Dogma 2 producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi tells us that game director Hideaki Itsuno simply had a lot on his plate that had to be dealt with before he was able to return to the series. Namely, developer Capcom's constantly work on another major series demanded Itsuno's focus first.

"It's simply the case that as a company with many large series on the go at the same time, while we, of course, love Dragon's Dogma and Itsuno-san has commented he would love to just get straight back to it, there are lots of projects scheduled, and he had to put his attention on other games for a while before being able to come back to Dragon's Dogma," Hirabayashi says. 

"It's not just a matter of schedule – these games, especially open-world style games, they take a massive amount of resources, manpower, and development time and planning to implement," he continues. "So the stars really had to align for the director and a large enough team and the resources and the time to all be available at the right timing for him to get back into it. It wasn't so much that we waited for any particular reason, but that's just realistically how long it took for him to tackle everything else that was on his slate before he got back into it."

Itsuno has certainly been busy over the years – since the launch of Dragon's Dogma 2, he's received credits on multiple Devil May Cry games, including as director of Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition and Devil May Cry 5. Needless to say, it's clear why there wasn't time for Dragon's