I'm a bit late, but I thought I'd post my beta impressions.
Overall, the game looked good and had decent controls. It felt a lot like a Watchdogs MMO.
I reckon it'll be a decent game for a fair amount of hours, but it seems like it'll get very boring for people wanting to spend "MMO" amounts of time on it.
The main problems are the enemies and the setting.
Dude in a hoodie with a rifle/pistol/bat got repetitive after about 5 hours in the beta. Guy with a flamethrower adds some variety, but it's not enough. Certainly if the game is going to last 50 hours or more.
I hope we get some more interesting enemies, and stuff like body armour with weak spots, because otherwise every mission is just going to be getting into cover and sniping.
Maybe all the skills could make it more interesting.
Perhaps the worst thing is the setting. NYC is a great city, but not for a modern military game. We've basically got a map that looks like a square grid, with every street filled with generic chest-height cover clutter and lined with multistory buildings that we mostly can't enter. Once you've seen one street you've seen them all. It's hard to think of a city with less variety than mid-town NYC.
In terms of landmarks, we've got Times Square, the Empire State and the Flatiron Building. For a cover based shooter, the latter two might as well be any multistory office building, since you've not got any real verticality in your movement (cf. games like Prototype or even Lego Marvel, where being able to climb/jump makes skyscrapers more interesting/impressive).
No Central Park. No Bridges. No Statue of Liberty. No Washington Park. No Battery Park. No Ground Zero. Not even that building from Ghostbusters.
That scenery is going to get really tedious. The snow and post-apocalyptic clutter means that areas like Chinatown are going to look practically identical to anywhere else, save for a few neon signs having Chinese characters replacing English.
Worse is that traversal is really boring. Run and mantle for hundreds of meters between objectives, since fast ravel points are about a kilometer apart.
I'm not a huge Destiny fan and I complained about the lack of content and variety there. But Destiny had 4 very different looking planets,4 very different enemy types, and the Sparrow made traversing the environment fun and fast.
The Dark Zone is interesting, but I doubt its long term appeal. As people get organised, the metagame is going to drive away casual and at least one of the PVE, PK, anti-PK player groups that are required for it to be fun.
I'm not cancelling my pre-order, but I think this is most likely to be a game I complete and sell on (or that I never complete and that sits on the backlog shelf of shame with several other Ubisoft-style open world games), rather than a long-term thing.
To end on a positive note, the matchmaking seems much better than Destiny. With the classless RPG skill system, it could make for some really fun mission planning. Proximity chat could also make things fun in the Dark Zone if they somehow balance it right.