Played 2 tests this weekend. Custom tournament where I replace one of the member teams with my custom squad of dudes I like.
Have to say that the overall experience was very good!
The batting was great. Left handed batters still get too easy balls to hit down the legside but for whatever reason the AI stops doing this after the 15th over. I'm not sure why this is the case, but scoring runs in the first 10 overs of a test are significantly easier than after. I'm not sure why but once you get to the 20th over the batting suddenly becomes legit difficult and the AI does well to build up pressure.
Bowling is also better but the spinners are still weird. It's not that we get 4-6 wickets per inning via spin (i'm cool with that), nor that the ball doesn't turn that much (such is life) but that somehow both are happening at the same time. Either have the ball turn more or make the AI better at spin.
Fielding is fine and less glitchy than ever. I still have to reset 3-4 times per inning after some strange run out but outside of that it actually feels good.
We have something really good at the moment and if a few other features can be tuned properly we might have finally arrived at a place that's a tier higher than 19/22.
If this is the case and the core gameplay is actually improved, then it means BA can focus all other energy on presentation/in-game features which might finally be due a real upgrade.
tl,dr: game is legit.