I'm hoping they haven't completely removed the Paper Mario style reactionary button pressing gameplay. It's not going to make me mad/sad if they have, especially if the new system actually turns out being more enjoyable, but I quite liked that aspect of Stick of Truth.
I just noticed that there was never a single button prompt in the combat segments, but it could just be an E3-specific thing, as they tend to do weird stuff for E3 presentations.
Seems like this time around combat will be a bit more tactical, rather than in Stick of Truth where it was more about timing. I feel like at the end of the day, even though I enjoyed that Paper Mario style gameplay, there's more opportunity to make something more challenging, thoughtful and tactical with a constantly moving and evolving battlefield like what they're doing. You could possibly even have fights that shift from room to room without having to stop/start combat.
Also extremely pleased with the angle they've gone for. I was wondering whether they were going to possibly pull a rehash of Cthulu from Season 13, or just make the boys fight something really powerful, but I'm glad they're not only taking the total piss out of the current state of Superhero movies, but pitting the boys against each other. I'm looking forward immensely to seeing how far it goes and where they take everything in general.
Really all they needed to do after Stick of Truth was ensure the next game had: More challenging & deeper combat, better class distinction/variation, and more general run-time and/or split paths (Think Witcher 2).
The impression I'm getting from the footage is that all of this is at least very much possible, or at least it doesn't look like they've majorly screwed anything up from SoT > TFBW, but we'll have to wait for something akin to the Giggling Donkey pre-release footage for TFBW to get a clearer idea.
Nevertheless, it's literally the only game shown at E3 that I know absolutely and 100% I'm buying the shit out of it day one, and considering the history of many licensed games, I'm still shocked I'm saying that about a South Park game.