-You start more underleveled than ever. -Combat Leveling is slower than in Warband.
Not entirely sure I agree. The new perk style system means there's now two levelling systems in play, and I'm not sure yet which one is the more influential (I suspect perks, given levelling only seems to chuck a focus point your way). I'm not really finding myself under level at the beginning of the game though - I've won several melee tournaments already despite having dumped pretty much all of the starting skill points into bows and riding.
In terms of speed gaining levels does seem slower, though at present it seems faster than skill gain. I've only been mucking around for a couple of hours, and I've hit character level 4 yet skill growth is pretty stagnant - riding has increased by two (the only time I've not been fighting from horseback is during tournaments), bows not at all and a single point into one handed despite that being probably the most used skill at present (won a nice sword in a tournament, so plans for horse archery currently out of the window).
Obviously early days at the moment, but initial impression is that the skill point gain for low level skills (my one handed started at 15) should be a bit quicker; ideally let me hit that first perk or two relatively quickly then make me work to increase that skill.
-Loading times are long and menus are unnecessarily cumbersome.
Part of that is going to come down to your system, particularly the load times. It's not particularly bad for me (SSD), but it's still somewhat annoying when you click on one of the 'quick' options to talk to a character then have it transition to the 3D scene to talk to them. Surely the point of a quick option is for it to be quick?
What do you think about gameplay? I seem to be the minority since 80% of reviews on Steam are positive.
So far it feels a little more Warband 1.5 than Mount & Blade II, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. My main disappointment so far is that the AI doesn't seem to have changed, well, at all. It's still dumb as a brick with the tactical nuance of a dead gerbil, and it still seems to favour the 'everyone chase around like a horde of wasps' approach to combat. I wasn't expecting miracles, but after eight years it'd be nice if it had at least a simple understanding of concepts like not getting in the way of each others attacks, or how to actually surround a target so they're not all futil