Since it is an offical release now, I assume it's okay to split out my post again. If not, sorry for the moderating overhead, Janus 
The Good:
1. Item names and modifiers are now capitalized.
2. Quick Save key (not sure if it works ...).
3. The obvious weapons on the PC model when sheathed.
4. The new textures. Water looks killer.
5. New voice-overs.
6. New menu backgrounds and layout.
7. Progress bars and on-screen info ("left click to continue", etc).
8. Town menu text smaller.
9. New text renders nicely on a snowy battlefield.
10. Faster world map speed!
11. New arenas are very nice.
12. New armor types!
13. New spearhead cursor.
14. Horses don't walk through allied troops anymore! Foot combat still sucks though because of the friggin' flinching.
15. Neat new world map icons (caravan icon has a mule!).
16. Real-sized trees on the battlefield.
17. You can walk up the side of the battlefield edge a little.
18. OMG! It appears that you can have multiple parties fighting in one fight! I noticed that THREE Vaegir parties were in combat with ONE Swadian party on the world map: (EDIT: seems to be broken. If you fight in one of these battles, you crash the game.)
19. You now have to first sneak into a town to ask a lord for forgiveness ... nice.
The Bad:
1. Things broken that weren't broken in the last version that aren't graphics related.
a. River pirate quest broken.
b. Caravan quest (quests?) broken.
c. Both Marnid and Borcha recruitment broken.
2. Installer doesn't offer latest DirectX (to be fair, it isn't officially released yet Smile )
3. While the shield icon looks great, and visually shows damage, the current shield hitpoints should be next to it (not a "n/200", like before, just current hit points left).
4. Horse hitpoints appear to have been lessened. Seems they go down easy.
5. Penalty to NPC party skills. It's kind of silly to have an experienced NPC join you, but suddenly he can't work his skills to his full potential because he isn't the party leader. Perhaps this new penalty system would make sense for Leader skills, but the whole purpose of a Party is to create a mix of skills. This new, bad system will just force the player to create a "jack-of-all-trades" character just to get some Spotting skill or some Surgery skill. I think this change is potentially game breaking, especially for NPC-heavy mods like Extra NPC mod. You're going to be forced to just forget Party skills altogether and just have combat-heavy NPCs. I really wish Party skills worked like 0.711.The Ugly:
1. Dialogue text is even BIGGER than before!?!?! EDIT: You can scale the font on your own. 80 percent works about right.
2. Interiors (Zendar trainer's interior) too dark.
3. World map view angle too restrictive. Better the old way.
4. Party icons on the world map very fuzzy unless zoomed in almost all the way.
The Foreshadowing:
1. Town-entering menus say "... is held by friendly troops." Perhaps a strong indication of town capturing in the next release (the stuff rolled back).
More to come as I play around some.
