This is more of an overview, so it won't go very deep on any particular feature.  Also some "wish list" type stuff.

 

Likes:

• I LOVE how food and resting now interacts.  It gives an actual purpose to food in the game without having a stupid "hunger" bar that you have to keep topped up.  And it means that you don't have to carry around otherwise pointless "camping supplies".  However, I found edible food in some . . . odd places.
• OMG SO PRETTY
• I like how the NPCs have a schedule, although frankly this makes it bizarre how trader NPC's still stay "open" all night.  If the nameless peons are going to go sleep at night, so should everyone else (except guards maybe).  It would also be very cool if monsters had a day/night cycle (maybe even make some that are "active" at night and sleep during the day!).  This would make stealthing be more time-of-day dependent.
• Overland travel is really cool.  Or, maybe I should call it "overwater", hee.  Anyway, I like this aspect a lot.  The map does feel a tad static, though.  I'd really rather have it that you can only see things that you can interact with on the overland map when you get within a certain distance of them (perhaps modified by your Survival skill?).  This would give more of an exploration feel to it, I think.  Also, it's not really clear why you can't walk over some areas of the map.  I get that there are mountains there, but there aren't any cues to indicate that they're IMPASSIBLE mountains.  Ditto for rivers and so forth--it needs to be more obvious where you can and can't go.  Also, I think it would be EXTREMELY cool if the overland map had a day/night cycle and weather, particularly if the weather affected, say, your travel speed.
• Stealth--I like how much you can sneak past the fights.  However, I think I broke a quest by sneaking.  I snuck past almost all the fights in the Engwithan ruins

Dislikes:

• Combat.  Did not find this fun AT ALL.  Granted, I was still kind of getting used to how the game worked--I generally don't like starting with mid-level characters.  I had the same problem with the Pillars 1 beta.  But in this case, I wound up actually re-making my character as a stealth build so that I could avoid absolutely as much combat as was physically possible, no joke.  I REALLY wish you'd given us a LOT more cash in the beta so that we could actually spend some time actually OUTFITTING our characters and maybe hire some mercenaries if we didn't like our party loadout.  I really tried using class abilities but it felt like they never landed at all, in fact, I couldn't even tell in most cases if they just weren't going off or what.  I'd order, say, my fighter to knock down an enemy, and they'd never fall down.  Order the rogue to blind and enemy, and nothing ever happened.  Some visual or auditory cues (special animations?) to show when the special abilities are actually used would be very nice.  It also really felt like 100% of the enemies would just make a beeline for the priest in every. single. fight.  Even when I didn't have him cast any spells!  Two seconds into the fight, oh look, priest is mortally injured AGAIN.  None of the weapon proficiency modes seemed worth turning on, either.  Also, something like 80% of every combat was just NO PEN NO PEN NO PEN NO PEN.  WHY are my characters so awful that they can't do ANY damage?!  I didn't even BUILD four of them.  If I have to switch weapon types for LITERALLY EVERY ENEMY then every character should have 3 weapon sets as the default so that I can make sure all of them have a piercing, blunt, and slashing weapon set, because from what I can tell this is mandatory if they're even going to do their TINY amounts of damage.  This also makes weapon specialization silly, because the weapons you use are always going to be based on what can actually land on the enemy you're fighting.  If you want to make weapon specialization meaningful, make it so that if you're using a specialized weapon you get a BIG bonus to penetration so that even if you're going up against an enemy that normally resists that damage type, you can at least do SOME damage.
• Leveling up.  Found this confusing.  The class abilities page felt really narrow and uni-directional for the non-spellcaster classes.
• Not remotely enough skill points.  In Pillars 1 you could pick between having a variety of skills or having few, high skills.  Now you can't even do that, you're pretty much forced to distribute the skills among your party members.  Playing a "skilled character" is completely off the table now.  You might as well just make the skills a feature of the class with the way it's set up now, because you're going to have 1 skill per character ANYWAY.  How does it make any sense that you can't even do stealth AND trapping on a rogue, you have to pick ONE?!  Also, I don't get why some skills are separate.  It just seems like unnecessary duplication to have, say, Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate when you get ONE skill point to spend.  It's like saying "hey, even if you WANTED to invest in persuasion, you're still going to fail 2/3 of the time regardless of your investment because you won't have the right skill!"

You can get as much gold as you need and hire as many merceneries as you like with console commands.

You need to press "`" to activete console and type:

"Iroll20s" which will unlock cheats.

 

Than you can use:

"GivePlayerMoney <value>" with <value> being replaced by desired amount, to give yourself sa much gold as you want. Go shopping and fill your party with lvl 1 merceneries.

 

Finally:

"AddExperienceToLevel <value>" to bring everyone to desired lvl.

 

Have fun!

Well, as of now I can't even get the beta to launch on my PC.  Let me check--my latest save may just be out of date so I have to start a new game.

 

• Combat.  Did not find this fun AT ALL.  Granted, I was still kind of getting used to how the game worked--I generally don't like starting with mid-level characters.  I had the same problem with the Pillars 1 beta.  But in this case, I wound up actually re-making my character as a stealth build so that I could avoid absolutely as much combat as was physically possible, no joke.  I REALLY wish you'd given us a LOT more cash in the beta so that we could actually spend some time actually OUTFITTING our characters and maybe hire some mercenaries if we didn't like our party loadout.  I really tried using class abilities but it felt like they never landed at all, in fact, I couldn't even tell in most cases if they just weren't going off or what.  I'd order, say, my fighter to knock down an enemy, and they'd never fall down.  Order the rogue to blind and enemy, and nothing ever happened.  Some visual or auditory cues (special animations?) to show when the special abilities are actually used would be very nice.  It also really felt like 100% of the enemies would just make a beeline for the priest in every. single. fight.  Even when I didn't have him cast any spells!  Two seconds into the fight, oh look, priest is mortally injured AGAIN.  None of the weapon proficiency modes seemed worth turning on, either.  Also, something like 80% of every combat was just NO PEN NO PEN NO PEN NO PEN.  WHY are my characters so awful that they can't do ANY damage?!  I didn't even BUILD four of them.  If I have to switch weapon types for LITERALLY EVERY ENEMY then every character should have 3 weapon sets as the default so that I can make sure all of them have a piercing, blunt, and slashing weapon set, because from what I can tell this is mandatory if they're even going to do their TINY amounts of damage.  This also makes weapon specialization silly, because the weapons you use are always going to be based on what can actually land on the enemy you're fighting.  If you want to make weapon specialization meaningful, make it so that if you're using a specialized weapon you get a BIG bonus to penetration so that even if you're going up against an enemy that normally resists that damage type, you can at least do SOME damage.

 

 

This is pretty much everything I have a problem with. As it is now, I might play POE2 at launch, but it will be on the lowest difficulty and with level scaling because I don't think combat is in a good place at all. Mostly I feel like I'll let it sit for a year while Obsidian rolls out balancing patches before really going to town with it.