Tool-based gathering seems arduous. 6 whacks to mine or chop down a tree is too many. I assume the intention is to have better versions of these tools so that it takes less interactions, but will these be stat sticks or otherwise have any emergent gameplay? If not, please reduce this tedium as it only serves to punish players for being new. Also, consider autopickups for ground resources.
Random gear selection early seems to lead to unpleasantly punishing cludginess. Base functionality levels come off painfully low. Stamina levels, equip load feel intentionally over-crippled. Not wearing pants because you haven’t found any is one thing, not wearing them because you can’t maintain any level of agility with more than a sword and one piece of armor and a hat feels ridiculous. Being able to swing twice and be at zero stamina and unable to roll also feels inordinately punishing.
Early purchasable weapons with stat requirements also feels bad. Being unable to even try movesets for what is likely the worst possible version of a weapon in the game is unpleasant.
There seems to be a lot of early punishment that will become irrelevant for the majority of gameplay. What purpose does this aim to serve? Consider relaxing these choices.
I will cover one additional criticism that is largely speculative for my part. I have heard the intention is no way to respec out of some concept of commitment. Reconsider. This is a game, please learn the lessons other devs have learned about such systems. Obviously, it’s hard for a player to predict how long it would take to replace a character they consider suboptimal or downright poorly built at this point, but experience suggests this is a poor idea if true. As the game has been touted as offline-friendly (and we have our saves) the community will likely fix this, and it will feel bad.
Combat gameplay feels strong and tight. The art and sound direction are tremendous, and the performance (1440p on a 5800X3D/RTX3080) feels good other than the occasional dip which will likely be smoothed out, to say nothing about when DLSS is added. I very much look forward to multiplayer and the growth of the game content.