For anyone who bought the 2nd Edition Beta on DriveThru:

I understood when I bought the Beta that the $20 cost would be credited towards the purchase of the final version when it was released digitally. Does anyone have an idea when that may happen or if that's still a thing?

I've picked up from reading elsewhere on these forums that all the radical changes to the system have been scaled way back and the system is almost identical to Only War, which I found kind of disappointing. I really liked the non-hit-points gig and the ability trees. Any thoughts from those who tried the Beta and are in the know?

Thanks

OP

PDF releases are almost always months or weeks after the physical release. The thought is the delay will increase sales of the physical books, which cost more to make, because people don't want to wait. No idea how true that is but that's the rationale. So it's coming, just sit tight.

By the end of the beta the game was basically OW with a new coat of paint. There's threads about it.

They changed up character creation a bit. You no longer create your own regiment and there's no substitution for that like creating your inquisitor. Character creation has you pick a homeworld, job background (like military, academics, arbiters, etc) and a role for the party like doctor, scholar, fighter, etc. You use aptitudes like in only war. Weapon and equipment stats are changed around a bit. Lots of talents are gone and there are new ones and a lot of changes. Psykers can't fetter anymore. There's subtlety mechanic that has you track the teams subtlety while investigating on a scale of 1-100 and provides mechanics for changing subtlety but doesn't tell you what it should actually DO mechanically. There's a little by of a social combat system with NPCs having personalities that make them more or less responsive to different social approaches and a way to track how they feel about your players that has rules for changing it and can act sort of like social HP. You use influence to buy new items like you did requisition in Only War, but each character has an individual score and it's missing rules for important things like acquiring more than one item at once. The enemies section has a Creature Rating scale but there's no real guidance for what that actually means and if there's any math behind it like with D&D. Creatures also get divided into different groups, with low level ones being more easily killed. Psychic powers are the same as only war in terms of what the different powers are. The art in the book is gorgeous. You can spend influence to call in NPCs like assassins or space marines who you get to play as for a session.

So yeah, it's only war with most of the effort going into the chargen system. The other rules seem a bit tacked on. If you just wanted to run dark heresy in the only war system, all of the house ruling is done for you. If you wanted a new game system, you're not getting one.