>>129205Yeah I had that feeling too with Elden Ring, and I can see why Miyazaki keeps saying that he's not made the 'perfect rpg' yet and that he's a ways away from it. The bosses are mostly just hyper aggressive rollspam-catching metagaming annoyances and while some of them are great spectacle and fun to play against, it does feel more like fighting against the developer rather than the boss a lot of the time. It really makes me appreciate, and I know it's been said to death, the design of Demon Souls that much more, having a boss you can outsmart is more fun than a boss you can outplay, at least when it comes to FromSoft gameplay where it's not really that complex. You can have a Malenia or two scatter about, but they shouldn't make up the majority of the fights. That said, I think that Bayle was pretty fun, especially if you summoned Igon for it.
The world itself I think is really amazing and the connectedness is a nice touch up above the base game where the verticality of it all is really taken to a new level. Only issue, like you said, is that there's really not much of an incentive for world exploration when there's not much for you to really find by doing so. Extra scadutree/the other fragments are nice and feel rewarding to discover, but most of the other pickups are just crappy crafting recipes or materials that get used up and never really utilized much. I'd prefer if there were a way to craft cool new weapons or something, but then you'd have people complaining about balance or some dumb shit. I think that PvP balance should be a side thought to having a good PvE experience. Also the ambushes are so common across the world that it's almost predictable at this point.
That said, I think that there should be another system of currency besides souls/runes/whatever for these games. Something like gold or whatever that would be used for merchants and you could sell off the items you find around the world for it instead of picking it up from enemies. That way you'd have some tangential use for everything even if it were some piece of shit crafting mat that nobody would use. It was sorta already done in Sekiro, and I think it worked really well there. Not sure why they abandoned it when going to this game, unless it's just because 'that's the way souls games are'. I think they should strive for something better.
I do still like and enjoy SotE, but my criticisms are so abundant because I like it and want the team to do something better in the future.
(reposting here since I would want to talk more about fromsoft's design without taking up the vidya thread)