Regarding the player model (and the current art style)

Quote from Talbone

suggestion: instead of making 1st person 'hand' models, i think it would be way better if the new player model had its body and head meshes separated, so when in 1st person, you could hide the head, and then the player would see his whole body. this also opens up a way to customization, since you would apply mesh modifying techniques only to the head mesh (be it bones, morph points or even sub models). a similar technique is used on the mount&blade series of games by taleworlds.

Yes, we thought about this approach. Quite not sure if we do it this way, it has pros and cons, we will see, but thanks for pointing that out!

Quote from Talbone

question: is the current, realistic-ish art style final? from an artists point of view, i think the current artworks(not 100% of it but, lets say, 85%) are great and true to the overall theme, but it may turn out to be a trap further in the development, since making things look real is way harder than more stylized work.

We generally want to keep getting the game realistic in most aspects. But of course, every future asset has to fit to the rest. Probably the new player will look like the animals, just with more details (i.e. not super realistic, but definitly not a comic character)