Weirdly enough, I started playing it just yesterday. I'm a gamer and I died about 10 times in the first 2 hours. I always read it's newbie friendly etc, but am wondering how, as the game doesn't seem to have handhelding at all :D

I rage quit the game several times before it finally clicked.

The realisation was that "wait, Link is a coward!". I then avoided most battle encounters and spent most of my time just exploring.

The game doesn't hold your hand, but it does guide you to discover things pretty well. I never really felt lost, which is something I've often had problem with when playing open world games. I could explore, but I could also easily get back to whatever I needed to continue progress. There was also no penalty for exploration once you can fast travel, as you can easily get out of a bad situation.

What I think is really good is that there is no one right way to do something. With some games if you can't figure out what they are trying to tell you, you hit a brick wall. With BotW, I could always figure something out, even if it wasn't "right". For example, at one point you can talk to the old man chopping down trees and the intent is for you to chop down a tree to make a bridge across a gap. For whatever reason, I didn't pick up on this. However, there was a wall that I thought I might be able to use to climb over there. It wasn't trivial (I died several times), but it taught me how to find little places on walls to recover stamina while climbing. I was still able to get over there. This lesson on climbing paid dividends throughout my entire play through, while the tree bridge mechanic was almost never needed again.

The first non-red Bokoblin (in the skull with the archer out front) probably killed me 10 times on the first play through. That was a bit frustrating, but I eventually got it. But I just ran in there and tried to fight him directly. To use tactics, you should have just gotten a bow and arrow before activating the first tower, and you can shoot the rope that suspends the hanging light inside the skull (by shooing through the hole where the skull's eye would be). This causes an explosion and gives you a big leg up in the fight. Later there are shines that help teach you how to use the various fighting mechanics, which help level up your skill controlling Link.

Most of the dying I didn't mind so much, because there was little to no penalty for it, and all felt like I was learning something. Can I jump off this high thing... nope dead... how else can I do this? I used the manual save a lot, instead of just relying on the autosave, if I was about to do something risky.

Once you’ve grabbed your initial set of abilities from the opening area and stocked up on some weapons it becomes much easier. Shifting your mindset to “combat is almost entirely optional” also changes how hard the game feels.

Newbies tend to be really afraid of the monsters early in the game. Maybe you are used to games that puts enemies there for players to kill. You’re supposed to sneak around enemies in the early game (you just woke up weak after a 100 years…)

With that being said I don’t think it is newbie friendly though. The controls uses all buttons and many with different modes. It’s can be quite overwhelming imho.