Any plans on limiting a player's ability to sprint away from danger? I like the fantasy of getting chased down, and its pretty much a free escape unless you accidentally run towards more danger with the game's current design.
I think a stamina meter could work if implemented correctly, but it isn't perfect. There is the potential issue of a stamina system making cross-map exploration feel worse, but if you made it so that the player's stamina limit increases via cuddling with wildlife and climbing mountains to activate beacons, it would essentially be a temporary nerf that only reduces early game rates of exploration, and may actually have the benefit of making the world feel bigger and more immersive. You could also make it so that if a predator has spotted and is chasing you, you get a "panic" debuff that makes you burn through stamina faster, so that the stamina system could be generous enough not to overly impact world traversal, while fulfilling its purpose of making predators more intimidating. I do like that this proposed system would essentially balance itself, since a player having difficulty escaping danger would increase their max stamina faster by failing to escape.
I am quite aware that I have a bias towards horror games and games with high difficulty, so I don't know if any of this would even fit your vision for the game, and I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but I figured I'd bring it up for conversation. It could always be a toggle-able feature, but at the same time, putting that much work into a feature that people might just ignore wouldn't be the best use of design time overall.
Curious what everyone thinks.