Just curious about the lucky ones would had the opportunity to mingle with the pre release build.
Does higher difficulty (tactician) simply juice up the combat encounters or is it also increasing difficulty in general (e.g. higher DC for checks, higher respecing costs 100 being low).
According to PFH, they've treated each encounter individually. Some there are more enemies, some the enemies are smarter, some the terrain is less favorable, etc.
I don't think that non-combat checks will be affected. Combat encounters are changed so enemies might have more DC which would require higher attack rolls to land your hits, they might have higher spell save DC making their spells harder to resist, that sort of stuff. But for out of combat stuff there should be no difference.