Pros:
- It's more of The Division. It's the same core game.
- That said, there are some improvements. Looting in a group is a huge improvement. One person loots it, and everyone either automatically gets the materials, or if it is an item it appears on the ground nearby. That's so much better that each person having to open every box one at a time in a room with five boxes, literally having to wait in line.
- There are some mechanical changes. Weapon mods are no longer straight upgrades, for instance. They let you specialize a weapon. A certain sight might increase accuracy, but decrease stability. We never saw any equipment mods.
- The Division looked incredible. The lighting was spectacular, the colors stood out. In 2, that's no longer true. The lighting was dull and everything kind of blended together into a background blob. They seemed to try and cover this up by throwing tons of fog/haze/mist everywhere.
- The interface was a mess, and it was lazy. It was 100% designed to be used with a controller, and they didn't put any effort into making it work any other way. Sometimes the mouse works, sometimes it doesn't (and it never works well.) Sometimes you use/activate/interact with an item with the spacebar, sometimes F, sometimes tab, sometimes V, sometimes CTRL, sometimes E. The menus are nested so deeply that you'll be lucky if you don't need a spreadsheet printed out to remember how to get any particular function.
- This is just an impression based on a limited demo, and not based on any hard data, but I got the distinct impression that the game was designed with more grind to keep players at the screen longer. There are just too many things that need to be collected for too many purposes, crafting has been adjusted to be much more necessary. It'll take a lot more repetitive scavenging to get things done.
- There were quite a few glitches. Yes, it's a beta, but not really. A beta four days before retail is an advertising beta, not a testing beta.
- The voice acting, at least for the enemies/NPCs in the streets was terrible. The quality of the acting was bad, and the implementation was bad. Enemies would say two or three things each, but they'd often pick one and repeat it every few seconds. There was one faction where there was a woman who would either shout "We're fucked!" over and over while attacking, or just cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West non-stop throughout the fight. At first it was bad, then I couldn't stop laughing at how absurd it was, then it just got annoying.