Played up to first boss.
Healing will be an issue. Players won’t want to waste healing items while learning fights, which will just make bosses unnecessarily harder. On the other hand, if you know how much healing players always start with, you can better balance the boss. Remember Bloodborne, and how people had to farm the 2 werewolves near Cleric beast if they ran out of vials? Not fun.
Durability will be an issue. Switching weapons is not realistic, players will probably end up stuck in the middle of nowhere with broken gear if they fail a jump. Powder is a thing, but like in Souls games that have it, players are not going to use it. Nioh 1 reached this conclusion during alpha 1, when players were forced to switch weapons multiple times per mission.
Platforming will be an issue. With no way to control the camera, some angles, especially if you have close to invisble platforms, will be awkward and you will fall to your death and have to repeat everything. Rolling and mantling being the same button will probably have players roll to death out of a ledge plenty of times.
Enemies outpace the player in all regards, making combat slower by you having to wait for them to start so you can counter + high stamina cost for everything. First boss was basically roll, attack, can’t do anything else because I need to save stamina for the next roll, roll, wait for stamina to regen, roll, attack … it’s just not fun. Especially when I feel like I’m getting punished if I heal, because I will have less heals for the next try.
High stamina cost + high weight on pretty much all gear makes stamina and weight mandatory stats out the gate.
Absolutely needs gear/class/stat choice during character creation. Why do I need a 10 on every stat if I just want to unga bunga with a big sword?