Dark Souls II

The new animations are awesome. Everyone runs and attacks more smoothly, and it definitely looks more realistic and less choppy. The spell effects and sound is awesome as usual. Rolling is now a lot smoother, and seems a lot easier to dodge if you time it right. Pyromancies it seems can be used by staffs again (though it might just be for the sake of testing) but there seems to be a new miracle type called Hex. Oh and Soul Greatsword is super awesome looking.

Summoning (at least when it worked) seemed same as usual. However now you can use Estus Flasks as a phantom, as well as a new item called Lifegem (very simliar to the grass used in Demon Souls, single use items that give you varying amounts of health)

The framerate was kind of choppy (maybe around 20-25 FPS) but since it's still in beta I assume they can work that out.

The torch mechanic is bleh. It's like Doom 3 with its flashlight mechanic; you have to make the choice of either having your shield out or being able to see well. The problem is that if you switch out the torch it gets put out so you won't be able to use it again till the next bonfire. So a ton of the game is purposely dark, and it's really annoying if you're used to using shields a lot. So either you can see what's trying to kill you and then die because you can't block it, or you don't see anything and walk off a cliff.

The changes to stats also irk me. Stamina and Equipment load are now separate stats. Speed of using sorcery and how strong your sorcery is are now separate stats. Faith is unchanged. The stats really remind me of Demon's Souls, and was the one of several I liked Dark Souls over Demon's Souls.

Backstabbing is pretty much reverted to how hard it was to do in Demon's Souls, which can be good or bad depending on how much you like PvP revolving around people using Bandit Knife and Hornet Ring. Also, Estus Flasks are much slower to use. It's like half the speed it is in Dark Souls. It also heals slowly instead of instantly.

Let me ask the good people something: when has Pre-order weapons/buffs every given players an unfair advantage? They always suck.
The pre-order weapons for this game look like they're trying to show-off some different ascension routes (like the occult and chaos weapons in the first game).
Sure, if you pre-order from X you'll have a weapon that might poison enemies - but the pre-order bonus won't give you 500k souls!