so you are pinging from one VM to another VM on same host in same port group and you have packet loss?
if they are on same host in same portgroup, then i guess it must be something inside VM.
are the vNIC's supported for the OS?
for example "e1000" is not supported in Windows 2016 see VMware Compatibility Guide - Guest/Host Search
do you have vmtools installed?
are there any errors in VM OS log?
duplicate MAC? correct MTU?
what kind of OS is installed on both VMs?
are you able to ping somewhere without packet loss from that VM?