Very generally speaking:
I've seen the live plays and they haven't excited me. Rather, they've concerned me. I stopped trying to watch after the first two or so. I fully acknowledge they were learning as they went, but that just makes the rollout that much more problematic in my mind. I would rather have seen a system expert, designer, or demo person run them through it. No dis intended on the streamers, they did their best, they weren't my issue.
I'm all in favor of streamlining, and I have no problem with the reduced action economy (was thinking of the same thing for a homebrew), and magical admixture effects, simplified hacking, conditions, better structure to the Qualities, all that seems like wins. However, the game doesn't play the same. One of the things in the live play was the judgement errors made by the GM and players (not a criticism, they self-admitted to this) as veterans, and it was very punishing. I could see where Mr J was operating from. Those were all encounters I could see myself throwing at players. However, in this case, it was nearly a TPK, instead of acting as some spice to the run. With such a newly deadly system, and such fast combats, one bad round of rolls in an imbalanced encounter is going to scrub run after run until word gets around to GMs on how to tone things down. That means less spice in runs, and less fun at the table. Fights are too fast and too furious. Combined fire is extremely deadly, and I would never use it on my players (especially since they don't seem to have a way to return the favor -- may be wrong). The vehicle rules going backwards to m/ct also annoys the heck out of me. It's definitely hard for any ground combat game to do car chases well, but what we saw on the live plays didn't feel good. I want car chases that are nerve-wracking and fun. This was, well, not that. It also felt inconsistent, since ground combat eschews dice pool mods, but vehicle combat still has them (and they are crazy high).
The rule issues pointed out so far seem to me (so far) to be easily resolved with some house rules, as far as I can tell. However, the Edge system doesn't jazz me at all. It's also pretty clearly baked into all the parts of the system, as heavily as Limits were in 5E, leaving those who don't like it no choice but to abandon edition (again). It's progress towards a more streamlined game play, but it doesn't really appeal to me. It feels like it went too abstract, and to no good effect. It doesn't help that there's been so much confusion around how Edge is earned and spent, without really any official clarification from CGL.
So at the moment, I am still on the fence about ever getting the CRB. I feel like I probably won't want to play what's been written. I like when rules make good sense or are at least close to the mark. At this point, I am only considering buying it to seethe full menu of changes and what I might want to port to a different system. It still has a lot of 5E feel to what I've seen, and that edition left me so cold I just shake my head to see it still there. "Everything has a price" and that font just sets my teeth on edge all over again.
Overall, I had to rate this 'Hell No' on the poll. I do plan to wait and see what some of the reaction is online. The digital QSR is batting 2 stars on DTRPG presently (that's one 5 star and 5 x 1 stars as of today). I'm pretty disappointed with what I am hearing so far in general. Insiders aren't exactly giving off the "ooh yer gonna love it" vibe either. More the opposite.
So right now, it's a Yikes from me, dog.
I would love to be wrong.
