I wouldn't have a problem if the beta tester subforum was visible to other people on a "read only" basis. If people not playing in the beta are posting and distracting those who potentially have a direct influence on the finished product, that is a problem.
Derp I forgot there will be a NDA, it's gonna be private access for sure.
Had we changed the sight range to be unlimited with True sight, we would have potentially lost some of what COH is. We didn't want to change the game fundamentally, we only wanted to improve on it.
As for other changes, it's hard to see in gameplay video with short clips, but we've added a number of new shaders, new lighting... the snow is really something cool. On DX11, the vehicles actually deform the snow with their treads (or as you can see with the infantry, footfalls). On lower DX versions, it just leaves a spline so gameplay won't change in that respect.
In addition, we've done a lot of optimization to get the engine running better than it did in CoH1 or DoWII - one of the biggest complaints of the original was the beefy machine needed, so we wanted to address that, too.
So if my laptop can run vcoh on low settings with about 20fps I'll be fine for CoH2?