I played several hours last night. I went into town, unlike all you horrible bandit people.
++Sunrise, Sunset! I love the weather graphics. The first storm was a bit strange in that the sun came out while lightning was still flashing but I was so impressed by the 'god rays' that I didn't care.
++ You can change your difficulty level on the fly!
+ Good save system. Fast, too.
+ Combat is fun so far, though I haven't fought much.
+ Exploration was fun and rewarding but now it's gotten weak in town. I'm assuming it will get good again once I get outside again.
+ Characters and region story are interesting.
+ Voice acting on the whole is quite good (in English, anyway).
+ Graphics look great to me.
- The quests so far have been a tad weak. (Jeez, another detective quest? Can we outlaw those for the next 5 years, please?)
- Every now and again, the main character's voice acting will sound pathetic. I get the feeling he got handed a big list of "Who is {NPC name}?" lines which he did one after the other.
- There's just one or two female models so far. It's very strange to see Sara's clones all over the place. There are quite a few repeated male models, too, but at least there's enough of them to suspend disbelief a bit.
- I ran into one serious pathing issue where a Sara-clone was supposed to go around a building. She couldn't do it. She would get hung up on one of the pillars, suddenly zip up to the top of the pillar, then fall back down - over and over. I managed to work around it by walking between her and the building. I've seen other NPCs dancing on the walls around town, too.
- Your ability to just walk through thick brush is handy but very immersion breaking.
- Some dialog trees seem off whack. I'll click a question and my character will ask something else. Something that sounds like a response to the answer I would have gotten if I had asked what I clicked on.
- Journal breaks when large fonts are selected. (That's a trivial bug to repeat, though, so I expect a patch for it soon.)
I should hate the jumping animation but, honestly, it's just too funny! Luckily, I play in a location where I'm free to shout "weee hawwww" as I leap through the air.
Being able to change difficulty is a huge plus to me. In the past, Gothic difficulty levels were translated badly. They would say "Easy, Medium, Hard" when, in fact, they meant to say "Medium, Hard, I Found An Exploit". It's always hard to guess how difficult a game is going to be until you've played it for awhile so I hate it when a game forces me to pick before I've done anything then makes me restart if I want to change my mind.