Kingdom Come: Deliverance

• The first part of the story serves as an extended tutorial/introduction. It's probably a good idea to postpone most open-world stuff and follow the main quest until it brings you to a place called Neuhof and resolved the issue there. Doing that will get you a reasonable set of starting equipment, a horse, and a couple of tutorial sessions for important things like combat, archery, and hunting.

• When the priest in Uzhitz invites you to come drinking, say yes. You won't regret it.

• The minigame for lockpicking is kind of dire. Consider using a mod to make it less of a nuisance.

• People respond to your appearance. If you wear particularly fancy clothes, you'll do better in speech tests. If you wear heavy armour and fearsome (ideally bloodspattered) weapons, you'll be better at intimidation. If you're dirty and covered in mud, everybody will think less of you. Using the water buckets in front of many buildings will remove the worst dirt, but you need to visit the baths every now and then to launder your clothes and armour to get them completely clean.

• If you're low on money, go poaching. Spend a few minutes killing a bunch of hares and deer and get a boatload of valuable meat. That meat will be marked as stolen (since poaching is illegal) but you can remove that just by cooking it at any cookpot (aim at the fire below the pot for cooking options) and sell it legally for the full price.

• On that note, the "stolen" tag on items will eventually decay over time. If you find yourself in possession of a very valuable stolen item, just stuff it into your trunk for the time being and you'll eventually be able to sell it legitimately.

• Being the son of a blacksmith, you can use the grindstones that are scattered around the world to repair any bladed weapons through a simple minigame. You should always do that, as a fully-repaired weapon sells for a much better price and it doesn't cost you anything but a few seconds of effort for each weapon. It also raises your Maintenance skill, which has a couple of pretty useful perks down the line.

• The combat arena in Rattay remains useful after the first tutorial fight there. Make sure to go back there at some point and talk to Sir Bernard for further training. Not only does he have some tutorials for advanced techniques (like the very important riposte), but all practice fights in there also actually count towards improving your skills and attributes. Going for a few rounds there is a great way of raising your skill for axes and maces to a decent level.

• The combat system is very detailed in terms of armour and hit zones. Sword slashes against metal armour will do almost nothing. Sword thrusts can do alright damage through chain, but will do fairly little against plate (though there are some advanced moves that target gaps and weak spots). Armour is tracked for a lot of small individual areas, so if your opponent is wearing an open helmet without a visor you can absolutely stab them in their unprotected face for massive damage. Last but not least, if you hit a particular piece of armour several times, it will degrade and become less protective, so you can eventually brute-force your way even through heavily armoured enemies. Though it's probably better to just use a mace or hammer for those.