Of course, you are totally free to call it paranoia, please bear (pun not intended, or perhaps yes!) with me if I call it common sense. We'll have swords, cross bows and, who knows, machine guns. At the same time, I read that we will start with more or less a stick and a stone.
A sword against a bear or a lion is almost useless; a cross bow is useful, but perhaps a sizeable amount of game time will be needed until this technology is developed; in the meantime, any approaching big beast will be fatal. In any case, the game will amount to a rush to develop weapon technology, which is a very limited perspective, compared with even today, alpha Rising World: I might find interesting doing it once, perhaps twice; the fourth time would be utterly boring. Unless...
Unless the bear and the lion look like a bear or a lion but act like a small size dog or a cat, the human character is super-powered and can kill a big beast simply by throwing rocks, the recharge time of a cross bow is laughably short and so on. In practice, if the whole thing makes little sense and boils down to magic in disguise.
About the groups I described above: look at civilisations which only have short bows and spears (a few still remain or were at least documented before disappearing) and how they hunt large aggressive beasts; they do in group of 12-15-20: some try to push the beast toward a suitable place, some try to consume its strength and focus with dispersed attacks and finally some will, with some luck, kill it. And it seems the game will start at even a lower level than that. A single human being without a strong, quick, long range weapon against a lion is simply dead.
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Nah, that's no common sense. Paranoia. You also slipped by mentioning machine guns when we're only going up to pistols & muskets, nothing more. There's no Battlefield 1942, 2, 2142, or any Call of Duty crap here.
Managed to keep myself well defended against Tigers so swords are useful there, yet you'll be happy with crossbows & such, so I'll let you have that one. If there's rushing then I blame the player, not the game, because I've always seen them whine & moan while hiding in creative mode. The meat of the game is there, yet they always hide away, or go straight for the goodies by taking the lazy route. Players ruin very good things, as with how they swarm & mob things. I've seen many games having good concepts ruined by people themselves that I generally hate humans as a whole.
For the third paragraph you'd be lucky this is Red51, Rising World, and still in testing because everything can be appropriately changed, tweaked, and even alterable at your will. Seeing as how Red51 is wanting to go towards realism I'd give the crossbow a good 5-10 second delay per loading & firing, the same with how long it takes to fill a bucket. I see no magic here. As for throwing rocks comment I'd expect it to do trivial (pointless) damage. Seeing as how you're already doing worthless damage with a pickaxe & such, that's what I'd expect with rocks in Rising World.
Noted. Well, then focus on finding the lone animals in the group. Don't go straight for the herd, or the most powerful. Focus on what you can kill, and kill it. You learn this in Silent HUnter 3 with the same logic of hunting what you can, then reaping the rewards from such. Once you gain access to NPC buddies & friends then that's all fine & dandy to go hunting the groups of animals, or the most stubborn & aggressive type. Nothing wrong there.
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Edit: I guess I'm now being insulting, yet that's how much it's bothering me now with how silly this is getting. So much fear over something natural, yet it's being treated as something insanely hardcore when it truly isn't.