Braking distance is the shortest in Standard Physics, so it's sure the braking zones begin far enough from the apex.. 5 years of developement, 5 games to finally fix it! I don't know even how they didn't noticed before.
The AI is not improved at all, at least from what I can understand from a video: some riders keep going off the track and they haven't a proper racing line for overtake of defense manoeuvre.
Sound is improved, yes, finally. And this is a mayor point as the sound in a racing game holds a bigger part of the realism then the graphics, but from what I can ear it's not super accurate: it's far far better for sure, but still far from the real one.
Small notice: the Honda still has the older engine sound, Milestone guys surely recorded it when Honda didn't have the new 2017 big-bang engine yet.
Gameplay looks the same, I say looks because that's the only thing we can do. But I'm sure they kept the same mechanics as before, and that's sad.
I'm not expecting a sim-game at all, but some small clever implementations would be nice: different tyre compounds with different working temperatures, manual starts, flag to flag races, dynamic wheater, track grip changes during the weekend. These seem big words, but actually they aren't: most of these features needs only few lines of code, other take longer but it's their job to do that.
My feeling through the years is the same: seems that they actually don't play their own game than once a week. They made a casual game for casual gamers who play twice a month in 3 laps races. When someone try to play for real, 100% races and full weekend, the game seems dull and boring, repetitive and never deep enough to discover something.
Last but not least, will they update the game through the year? They not even fix the bug we reported between a game and the following one, how can we expect they start to do this time?
My hopes are tiny tiny.
I'm sure this game will be better than 16, just because they couldn't have done worse, but they have to fix the AI, I'm sure they didn't and the races will be the same s**t as before.
My last hope died last year, this time I'll not spend 50€ just because I love motogp games, I'll wait and see.