Happy New Year!
What have I heard?
Overall, the game is much simpler to play and understand. But they still have a lot of character options, but they expanded the feat system a lot rather than making each class a special snowflake with a lot of class specific rules. Maybe they repurposed my Flavor Feat idea! ;D
In combat, they did away with Standard, Move, Free, etc actions. Now each turn every character has 3 Actions. Different activities take different number of Actions. Most things take 1. Casting a Spell takes 2. Moving takes 1. You can attack 3 times from 1st level now, if you don't do anything else. It's just that every attack after the 1st gets a -5 cumulative penalty. You score a critical hit if you beat the target AC by 10 or more, and no more rolling to confirm.
There are now 3 power sources for Magic: Arcane, Divine, Primal, and Occult. Wizards are Arcane. Clerics are Divine. Druids are Primal. Bards are Occult. Sorcerers pick a source based on where they get their powers. So, you could have a Sorcerer that cast Divine Spells.
There isn't a specific list of spells for each class. Each class just falls into one of the boxes for a source. There is some overlap. A healing spell might be both Divine and Primal, for example. It's a way to categorize the spells without having 15 different lists or 3 different spells that do basically the same thing. The mechanics of spellcaster vary from class to class, depending on whether you are a prepared or spontaneous caster.
So a lot less complexity. I think there's only 40 pages of rules in the new book; everything else is class descriptions, creating a Character, spell List, skills, feats, game master section, equipment, treasure and that kind of stuff.
Sounds a lot different to me!