https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oYJAnhvgNk

Not the best variant of walkthru, but, at very least, we can see how it looks in actual game.

Either they haven't finsihed tweaking the controls yet, or that person was horrible with a gamepad. A couple of things I'm curious on from what I saw, wouldn't climbing up walls/dropping off from heights be masquerade violations? Will the quest givers tell you exactly where to go (follow the dots)?

Only time will tell.

Turn off the blinking arrows and highlit hotspots in games?! Nope nope no, that smacks of ages long past. You must tell the player exactly where to go and what to do or there will be too much complaints.

Agreed. Skyrim worked great for me on my first playthru with the compass and pointers turned off, epecially with Better Quest Objectives and no GPS on map (or the paper held map). You kind of knew where you were going, but not really.

Even an option to just turn on/off specific hand holding features would be nice.

Definitely. Kind of kills the game if quests point exactly to where you're supposed to go - especially for those quests which are supposed to be more vague.

Apart from that, this is looking pretty good so far.

Also, I suspect the fact the PC isn't busted when he drops from massive heights or climbs like a monkey could be due to the alpha status - they've likely not turned on the detection mechanisms for masquerade violations yet?

I have a few major gripes with the game so far and i hope they will fix most of it before March 2020 or if not delay it.

Good stuff:
I liked the atmosphere of walking the streets at night and the detail of the city itself, i like the different abilities shown, i enjoy the variety of dialogue choices and especially with the majority of them being influenced by skills.

Bad Stuff: The animations whether it's facial expressions, movement or combat it's extremely janky. The poor AI of enemy npc's since they just stand there and wait for you strke them while firing a few bursts here and there and i also really dislike the occasional flips during combat and would want that removed or option to turn them off. The dialogue itself doesn't flow naturally and the occasionally bad voice acting takes me out of the experience.
Turning to mist should bypass locked bars because honestly it makes no sense otherwise.

All in all i'm honestly not impressed at all in fact i'm rather of the negative opinion right now, i know it's pre alpha and majority of testing is still ahead of them but i hope 10 months is enough considering the game apparently has been in development since 2015.

Let's be honest here - combat in VtMB was mediocre. But we love that game for it's story, characters and atmosphere. So far I'm for one quite pleased with visual design of VnMB2.
Everything else they have 9 months to polish.

Its a tiny demo for such verbose dislike some people have for it. They didn't allow other people to play it only employees with strict limitations. You can see in at least one of the videos the player goes down a particular road and entire buildings pop in shortly ahead of them. I would wait for actual playable demos before getting upset about animations and ai.

I enjoyed seeing that they're aiming for gameplay akin to the original. It hasn't suddenly become Prince of Persia with a Vampire theme. The demo confirmed different character looks, clans, skills, mission approaches, dialogue and outcomes. I'm not that caught up on it being flawlessly animated if it can deliver on that, and compared to some of its fellow rpg e3 demos the bar isn't really that much higher for them to reach or exceed in animations or enemy ai either.

Not that I'm above being inordinately critical of something based on one single demo. After years of constipated non releases it seems EA finally took some laxative and is pushing out the soft serve turd Fallen Order...

I'd even go so far as to say combat in VtMB was janky as hell. Well melee definitely was janky, while the FP ranged combat was a bit behind the times compared to FPS games of the day. The important thing was it was still functional enough to be enjoyable without too much frustration, unless you really screwed up your character build.

So far the combat in this looks much better. I'm sure they'll fix the issues in the time they have.

(And if not, wesp5 will probably mod it for the next ten years to fix everything... ;)).

I've always held action games to different standards than FPS. I think comparing them to each other does disservice to both genres.

Developer laziness - they'd have to give clues and that takes thinking on their part. Good clues makes highlighting locations unneeded.
Most games now seem to be, "Here, I'll highlight it on your map".

That is so true. It's especially obvious (and jarring) when you get a massive cutscene and/or text dump detailing what you're supposed to do, yet nowhere in that information is there any indication of where you're actually supposed to go - but then BOOM the magic quest marker points to the exact spot. In those cases, the quest would be ridiculously difficult without the quest marker - but only because whoever wrote the quest text/cutscene didn't specify where to go in the quest text/scene (most likely due to lack of coordination between writers and level designers?).

BTW I don't actually mind if something is highlighted on the map, e.g. a general location or a town or something. It's when it gets ridiculously accurate to the point of identifying the exact person/pixel - and even more so when it's integrated into a magical quest compass. My sense of direction sucks pretty bad, but I would still prefer to find things myself - with modern graphics capabilities, environments can be more detailed than ever, so one would think there'd be LESS need for this hand-holdy magic compass thing.