I play the beta, and it feels like something is missing. Obviously, the magic system hasn't been implemented yet, and that will be a big piece of the pie, but even with no magic system I enjoyed MoM. Some thoughts:

--In MoM I liked that every few turns some cool hero would show up at my court and I would be able to decide if I wanted him or not. I also liked the variety of heroes to choose from and how different they were. I would always take any hero that was 'noble' for example because it was free gold. Also the variety in you could have pure melee, pure archer, pure mage and hybrids. All the different stats heroes had, the customization was a fun almost side-game.

--Exploration - it was fun to see an old ruin and find there were dragons there. You knew you couldn't beat them, but you'd look forward to getting a strong hero that could walk in and win the battle and gain some cool new magic item

--Units - you could produce a variety of units depending on your race. Rushing to the underworld to grab some regenerating trolls, or taking over a dark-elf town for the mages which were good at defending town walls or halfling slingers. I liked the unit combos and how different they were.

-- Again I know we're in the early stages, but walking around and first exploring the world doesn't feel as interesting as it did in MoM. I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it is the lack of monsters... probably it is a lack of danger and death lurking around every corner. Maybe this will be fixed once the AI is implemented and I crank up the difficulty

That feeling of 'arg, phantom warriors are attacking my city every other turn, and the gnolls from that neutral city are coming - if I can just survive 2 more turns I'll be able to summon my death knights and everything will work out'