Got the chance to play quite a bit tonight - overall I'm impressed and echo the positive impressions others have had. The changes to the controls make sense and work well, the visuals/animations are more polished and overall I'm very optimistic going forward from this first taster of gameplay.
A few things to note;
When trying to play fine shots to the leg side, it often results in the late cut shot being triggered which obviously hits the opposite way and ends up being an unsuitable shot for the line of the ball. This is despite the right analog stick being pressed towards 7-8 o'clock. What I intended is more of a leg glance guided behind square/towards fine leg. Flicking the stick more towards 9 o'clock produces an animation for the type of shot I'd want, but hits too square (although it's not easy to tell the shot direction exactly in the nets without a replay).
This happened sometimes in DBC14 as well but it's been a while since I played it regularly, so perhaps being a bit out of practice is making it more evident, but I am certain I'm not pressing the right stick towards the off side when this cut shot is triggered, I may try to record some gameplay tomorrow with an overlay displaying controller inputs to show what I mean.
Another thing is that I tried to see how ball on player collisions were - setting pace bowling and having the batsman stand still and get hit by the ball. The ball still seems to stop quite dead and lose nearly all momentum as it did in DBC14, resulting in the lack of leg byes and bat-pad catches. Again, without replays and not seeing where the ball would go in the outfield due to being in the nets, this observation may not be totally accurate.
Also, there's still no pain/reaction animations when hit by the ball, and I couldn't get the ball to bounce up to head height with pace bowling and the shortest length set with the marker. Perhaps away from the nets, there will be different pitch conditions which may produce more exaggerated or uneven bounce than indoor nets.
The nets run great for me (batting and bowling) at highest settings downsampled from 2880x1620 to 1920x1080, I used to do this with DBC14 so it's nice that it still seems to perform smoothly. That said, I appreciate that a proper match with more player models, the stadium, crowd etc will be more demanding so it's no guarantee I can play the full game in this resolution.
