Rise from the dead! The beta's out now. I tried a friend's copy of it, and it seems interesting, but not really groundbreaking yet. I only played for half an hour or so, but here's my first impressions:
The combat seems to be the big draw for people, but the swordplay is a little janky at the moment. I can see it being fun fighting against single enemies, but I don't know how it would scale up to multiple at a time. Didn't get to try archery or anything yet though. The best thing about the combat is how well people react to hits, it actually feels like your sword has connected with them, which is nice.
The voiceacting's kinda eh. Nothing to write home about, that's for sure.
There's horses and stuff, and you can fall off your horse, but I'm not sure exactly how. I was rushing through a forest at full speed, and didn't fall off, but when I walked against a tree for a bit, I did, so I dunno.
There's a kinda rudimentary crime system in there so far, you can attack villagers and stuff and they will react accordingly, pretty standard stuff.
The world in the beta is not too big, but I'm assuming it'll be bigger in the full release.
Finally, the biggest problem is the graphics. They are unoptimized as fuck. My buddy's got a pretty beefy rig, but even on medium settings he was only getting 25FPS or so, with textures taking forever to pop in and lagging to shit. The game itself doesn't look too bad, it's nothing amazing but it's still good, but the big problem is how unoptimized it is.
Oh, you also can't rebind keys yet, but I'm hoping that'll be changed.
These are just some quick first impressions of the beta. It seems like it'll be an alright game, but nothing too groundbreaking. Feel free to ask any questions and I'll see if I can answer them.