ad 1. What you are describing is a perfect block which indeed gives you a sort of special opportunity window. It's not a free card which would render the opponent completely defenseless however. Combat between high skilled player and a higher level NPC often includes long exchanges of perfect blocks and perfect evasions. Also perfect blocks are really hard to, well, perfect. We are not talking about AssCreed combat system set of incentives where you were pretty much force into a neverending sequence of wait->perfect block->counter-attack->rinse and repeat. Other incentives include
- other neat tricks which are more effective and faster to perform and chain and also less likely to succeed from the get-go.
- if your intend to exclusively hit the opponent through perfect-block->counter-attack combo you'll be primarily hitting the opponent into regenerating stamina instead of health. In order to harm the opponent (provided you've mastered the technique of perfect blocks) it it best for you to switch to other types of attack right after your counter-attack which are more risky and could be used against you.
ad 2. What we found out is that our "Living World™" is hard to navigate. If you played the alpha/beta, you might have noticed there was no telepathic knowledge of NPC names and next to no markers. Important NPCs could wander around a lot. It was really hard and frustrating sometimes. Sure, one could add a bunch of "Where's Waldo?" dialogues (and we did) and other supporting in-world systems and items however we decided to focus on other things, like quests and reactivity and whatnot. Also such systems and related nuisances might be fun for a small map with 5 quests and 30 NPCs but not for 100 quests on a large map with 1000 NPCs. An example - if you are meant to follow someone and they are meant to be independent from and you get astray, you are fucked without a marker, but if you're following the instructions you don't need to pay much attention to it. In that sense the markers even give you more freedom. And that's how the games is meant to be played. You are not dependent on markers 100% of the time but they are there and they make your life much easier. Some quests might rely on markers more than others. In short - the static text-driven worlds of olden days were much much easier to work with.
ad 3. We never got around to create any deeper systems around hunting or animals. It's a pretty standard thing you can find in most open-worldy games. Maybe in some next Kingdom Come. The archery alone is challenging enough.
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