Elden Ring does what Dark Souls did but quantity > quality. FromSoftware has taken the formula that has gotten them where they are now and put forward no innovation toward it aside from plopping it into an open world without putting any effort to truly merge it's own style with an open world.

Playing this game made me really think I hate open world games. I don't like Skyrim, Fallout, or The Witcher. However Zelda Breath of the Wild and Death Stranding are some of the greatest games I have ever played. So what gives? What gives is Elden Ring falls more into the Skyrims, the Fallouts, the The Witchers, etc. I guess Open World RPGs? As much as this game gets describes as Dark Souls meets Breath of the Wild I really can't see that being any further from the truth. BotW for me did something that made me realise Open World games are the future. I am not the only one who has realised this, Pokemon realised it, Dark Souls realised it, Final Fantasy realised it. Even a series I dearly love, the Tales of series realised it. Every game wants to be open world but none of them do anything to stand out it's all just in a pile of sameness that I can't help but hate to see and Elden Ring is no exception. In truth I understand why people call Elden Ring a masterpiece, they think The Witcher 3 was a masterpiece. This game is going to crush that but that as a standard is so utterly low.

So because I rant I will try to divide my thoughts the best I can into sections.

Lots to do, little of it fun:
Recycling. Oh dearest recycling. The truth is it's what gets games released. For a game to be a large as an Elden Ring and have unique boss encounters at each cave or mine or ruin would simply require too much development time. However there is actually a solution to this. Don't do it. Just get the good stuff out there and call it a game. I feel like there's this perception that the more hours you can get out of a game the higher value it is. I couldn't help but feel a clear distinction between doing required story tied locations and the entire rest of the game. I wish a cave was as fulfilling as going through Stormveil Castle, but it's not. I don't know if it's possible for it to be so. That's why I say this game is quantity > quality. Caves/mines/ruins/graves/whatever other locations that are the same walk through a place with little to no enemy diversity until you reach the end and fight a boss you already learned how to kill 20 hours ago is repetitive, it simply is. They all are such a big part of this game though, am I expected to skip them if I don't enjoy it? Then I am just playing Dark Souls but with boring horse riding in between the cool places.

Exploration is kinda pointless:
Here's my issue. Going to a cool looking tower or house rarely yields anything as rewarding as a ruin. So it would seem, at least to me, that by design this game is encouraging you to look for the same copy pasted landmarks to explore those instead of actually interesting uniquely designed landmarks. I noticed this early game, I kept going place to place but wasn't really getting anything, no loot, no hints for side quests, no interesting enemy encounters, nothing. Until I noticed a trend: There's these ruins that always look the same and always have good stuff at them. So I started going to those. Not because I wanted to, but because the game taught me to. I don't want to go to another Ruin, they get boring incredibly quick when they're the same design and always just have a staircase leading down to a boss or a chest.

Everything's underground:
Why is so much of this game underground? It feels like this game's world was created, and it's a great world I cannot deny that, but then they realised they needed to fill it with stuff but that's kinda hard to do once you've laid everything out so they just put a bunch of stuff underground where they can start doing whatever they want. Caves are underground, graves are underground, ruins narrow down to just being underground. It legitimately seems like a cop out. Why are there so few field bosses on the surface that actually belong or are unique? Why do I fight 10 Night Cavalries and Death Birds? Give me more Commander O'Neills!

Travel vs. Exploration and why I don't like Fast Travel:
If I can, within reason, I will play games without fast travel. It's how I prefer games, I don't like my exploration of a cool world to come down to menu interactions. I like that travel even if it takes awhile so long as it's enjoyable. Elden Ring travel is boring. I don't mean exploration, I mean travel, going from point A to point B. Compare this to the pioneer walking simulator, Death Stranding. Death Stranding is far more travel than it is exploration so it is a perfect case study of how to do travel correctly. In Death Stranding your objective is to get cargo from point A to point B, but it's what is along that journey that makes the game beautiful. You have a huge stack of packages on your back that you have to balance and wisely traverse the harsh terrain to keep safe. Along your travels there are dozens of packages on the floor lost for you to return to their destination so you might see one for the Roboticist and how convenient that's only a small detour from your path to the Geologist. Might as well pick it up to get to her but wait now there's a balance issue with your cargo and you need to organise it. All of that gameplay for your travel is in place to make you not even want fast travel.
Now back to Elden Ring you get on your horse and ride. There's not interesting enough movement and there's nothing to do along the journey, so there is no reason to do it making everyone cut through the game as quickly as possible through a menu interaction that places them across the world. It just feels pointless to have this really cool world FromSoftware has made when you're just fast travelling all across it.

Elden Ring has all the great qualities of Dark Souls:
Dark Souls blew me away, I really got a special feeling that the game was doing something really spectacular and it did. The truth is this game doesn't majorly lack any of that. That's why I'm not surprised people love this game, my problem with it lies in how spread thin that stuff is. Going through Stormveil Castle isn't any worse than going through Blighttown, but after Blighttown is Sen's Fortress then Anor Londo. It is quality after quality. After Stormveil Castle you walk around a giant world that's not as engaging until you find the next big place to go to just to match the quality that every game before it had. It's that quantity > quality. Elden Ring is Dark Souls but you have to watch all the filler episodes.

It's 2022, but Elden Ring doesn't make it feel like it (coldest take here):
The instability is simply embarrassing. The lack of camera improvements or at least options to disable mario camera where strafing moves the camera especially when there's people using a mouse. The netcode? I can barely ever connect and when I do it's such an awful experience with me hitting the enemy but not doing damage and the exact same thing happening for my opponent because of latency. How is this stuff just being excused and ignored? Enemies can hit through walls even fog walls, but if your sword even slightly pricks a wall it will deflect. KB+M controls are horrendous. Balance is not even in the building. It makes me really question how much this game has improved upon the Dark Souls 1 I played last year. It doesn't feel improved, I excused that game for being old but this one should not be excused in the same ways but it largely is.

I'll leave it at that. Having as many hours as I have leaves me with a lot of thoughts, and that's what this is. It's some of my thoughts. I desperately wanted to love this game, but I didn't. Not even close.