By contrast, my PC experience with the Open Beta was sadly the opposite to yours. I say sadly because I really want to like it.
I enjoyed The Crew for what it was - a solid arcade-ish driving game that let me create some outlandish tuned up vehicles, and thrash about in a semi-open world doing a bunch of ridiculously improbable things with cars that I’ll never actually get close to doing in real life. Good, meaningless, escapist fun in other words. Exactly what casual gaming is all about for me.
With that spirit in mind, I was looking forward to doing the same with TC2, and with the added bonus of bikes, planes and boats thrown in too. Sadly, I had ridiculously irritating controller issues from the get go with the Open Beta, and never managed to go further than the Prologue. Tried first with a XBox controller (cos that’s the right way to play a Crew game, even on PC) 
Had the throttle jammed open, no ability to change gears, or even get back to the menu to change/check the controller settings. Got stuck against a building, unable to reverse. Spent a full minute “wriggling” the car left and right to get past the corner, and then still managed to catch up the other 3 racers in the Prologue before the transition to the boats - ridiculous rubberbanding was an issue in the first game too. Got to the end of the Prologue and the game froze up on me at the start of the cutscene. Had to C-A-D and shut it down with Task Manager.
Tried again later with M&KB, got through the Prologue and the game intro scenes okay but then when the game took me to the map to choose my first destination, it just zoomed itself into a blade of grass and wouldn’t allow me to zoom out again. I think I was still able to move around the map, but it was at such a close level as to be pointless. And then I couldn’t get out of the screen again as ESC did nothing (think I saw a note later that Return to Menu is bound by default to a different key for some reason - F10? - but there was no on-screen indication of this). Another Ctrl-Alt-Delete forced shutdown, and I was done with it.
And while I’m sure these frustrating little issues will be sorted out, and the game on PC will work fine, the whole experience left a bit of a sour taste with me. I went back to look at the pricing on the game, and as much as I initially considered picking it up at launch, there’s just no way I can justify those prices now. It’ll definitely stay on my Wishlists, but it’ll be there until it goes on heavy sale and has had time to patch out the problems.
Mod merge request please > The Crew 2 gets a release date