I took my 75,000 XP credits from Tiger 13 and created a control/draw/medium trajectory golfer and played a bit now. These are quick impressions, but ones that are already pretty obvious.
Positives:
The graphics are improved from the demo. Pinehurst has the most natural look I've ever seen in the series. The natural areas don't have a homogeneous look of years past. The courses look less post cardie and more organic.
A control golfer remedies a lot of the control problems I was having with either golfer in the demo. My CAG with the XP I was able to apply and the Season Ticket clubs can carry a drive 250 yards, and that's enough right now to have a fighting chance off the black tees.
The pitching, chipping and putting games are as pure as I can remember, from a control and interface standpoint, the presentation of each not withstanding (see Negatives).
I'm playing career mode in "Tournament" difficulty and find the control interface to be judiciously punitive in modeling swing errors.
The audio ambiance of the course environment is natural and varied.
Negatives
I can't come up with a gentle way to put this, but I find both presentation options - Follow Cam and Broadcast Cam - to be a disorienting mess from a player standpoint. Broadcast Cam totally takes the player out of game and turns them into a TV spectator, from tee to green, on the majority of most shots. Follow Cam at least tracks the ball on most shots of 45 yards or more, but often breaks down and follows the Broadcast Camera presentation technique of zooming the player out of the action, at line obscuring angles that give the player no opportunity to gauge what happened with the roll of longer putts in real time.
Follow Cam putting coverage also takes an annoying jump to the right on the putts of roughly 15 feet or less, at the moment of impact. It stays sort of behind the golfer, allowing you to have a better look at how the putt is following the slope, but the sudden teleport to this new perspective shatters the immersion that could have been preserved by simply holding the putt camera view until the finish. I'm truly astonished at how much this not only spoils any chance of a player perspective, spatially immersive experience, but it has an unfair impact on the gameplay as it blinds the player to data that they should be able to observe in real time!
Broadcast camera is more of a perspective destroying experience than I thought it would be. Quite often it's hard to tell where your ball is going because of the angles the overly abrupt camera cuts are taking. Its camera coverage of putting is even more deleterious than that of Follow cam, as you are more often zoomed out to such distant camera positions that it's difficult to see the ball, let alone discern anything about how it's breaking....
I don't really have any other negatives at this point, but I'm so devastated by how much the presentation options spoil the game aesthetically and functionally that they would pale in comparison anyway. The bottom line is that Tiger 14's presentation options are a game killer for me. This will be the first time in the current generation's series that I'll be sitting one of its iterations out.