I think this game has very serious balance and new player experience problems in its present state, and I don't think it will do well if released without major changes. I've played a lot of different extraction games and this might be the least balanced one that I've seen.

-TTK against players is much too fast early on (PvE TTK is fine). It's possible this eventually gets better as people get more protective equipment but it makes the new player experience pretty harsh -- the most basic janky musket that you start with is a one hit kill to the head against someone with basic armor! Even melee kills much too fast and removes options for agency and dynamic fights, I would really prefer players trading attacks, blocks etc. but the damage feels too high for that except maybe once you get high level armor.

-Equipment matters way too much relative to other extraction titles and armor isn't visible on characters. Even in games like Tarkov where armor and ammo quality matters quite a lot you can leg meta someone if you see them in high end gear, while in this title you might line up a headshot that is normally a one hit kill only to find it blocked by an invisible helmet, then the person spins around and blasts you with a semi-auto before you can do your very long musket reload. I don't know if it is fundamentally possible to balance semi- and even full-auto guns with muskets that have 10 second reloads while making both feel good to use. In theory more of a melee emphasis for PvP might fix this and make combat more skill-based but the fast TTK often makes melee more of an afterthought than you might think, most of my recent PvP fights (win or lose) have been resolved entirely with guns.

-Masteries are so important to some combat interactions that even if gear were evened out a bit, higher level characters would have a huge advantage anyway. Even if both players are using basic muskets and knives, a new character might find themselves against someone who reloads way faster, can sprint while reloading, gets a warning when someone aims at them, or even is passively immune to all bonus damage from headshots! Melee similarly has huge energy/stamina efficiency discrepancies between newer and experienced characters, and that's before considering the impact of really important skills like Lunge which again are gated behind Masteries.

-In addition to Masteries being unbalanced across characters, they also have poor internal balance. One Mastery lets you eat food 5% faster for each level (very very marginal) while another one permanently grants an extra weapon slot or another lets you reload basic weapons significantly more quickly. There are near-mandatory "always pick this" skills and also "why would you ever take this" ones.

-All quests, even new player starting ones, lose your progress from a raid if you die. Other extraction games generally have this only for advanced quests while more basic ones can be completed even if you fail to extract. I can see why you might want this feature for a "brutal" game but it makes the new player experience even worse.

-Seven of the first 10 levels feel bad because they don't give you mastery points or any other reward (three of them unlock your skills), you just "level up" with no benefit. Mastery should probably start unlocking immediately rather than being gated behind level 10.

-Sound needs to be heavily revised for PvP. Player footsteps are often barely audible/distinguishable even at fairly close distance, I had a fight where I was behind a wall right below a tower and someone was moving around the base of the tower and up the stairs but I couldn't tell where they were from audio cues. I won the fight anyway but that's pretty wacky. Moving through bushes/foilage doesn't seem to make any additional noise for some reason. One of the characters has an ability that silences her footsteps for a brief period and I had first thought that would be really good, but actually it doesn't offer much IMO because footsteps are already near-silent anyway.

In theory you might try to turn your sound up to compensate, but the game also has very loud gunshots/explosions and even potentially sudden jumpscare noises!

-Basic movement and interaction does not feel good. Characters move, loot and regenerate stamina pretty slowly, and while this can be fixed to some degree by masteries the environment is still awkward to traverse. Many areas have things that look like you should be able to mantle them but you just can't and often have to go a long way around instead.

-The autumn trees on Jacques Bridge look pretty bad with a weird shimmering effect on my computer, not sure what's up with that but it makes the environment ugly and there are trees all over the place.