The truly wonderful content of Elden Ring is in the areas that received the level of care all souls games have, the legacy dungeons. Stormveil, Raya Lucaria, Leyndell, the sewers..
The basic open world fields present no challenge, nothing of value, no amount of enemy ambushes can stop you from just bugging away on the horse, the areas you "explore" as you discover the world consists of copy pasted dungeon tilesets with just a few variations that were hand crafted, I've seen multiple copies that were 1:1 of some rooms in places like caves, catacombs and so on. Bosses are reused to the point of exhaustion. There's like more than 10 bosses that are essentially clones of Dark Souls 1 first boss, the Asylum Demon, just with one or two new moves, and its attack hitting you harder than the boss it clones. The game cannot receive the excuse that "you can just skip this content, it's optional" either, because it was purposefully designed to force you to do open world chores if you want to get the "full experience". Upgrading weapons other than the ones that use somber stones is very painful if you do not explore the countless repetitive mining tunnels filled with mostly the same enemies and with always a copy pasted boss at the end, where in a previous souls games the materials would be laying around in places you'd naturally traverse as you complete the game, here, the Legacy Dungeons do not offer much in the way of materials, and you would miss on a lot of game lore if you didn't complete the copy pasted content because this is, after all a souls game, and souls games have most of their writing in... item descriptions. It worked ok in a 40 hours game like Dark Souls 3 where you'd pick up items as you progress through the game. It's.. infuriating when you're told you need to do 140 hours of copy pasted content to experience the same amount of -actual- content other souls games give you.
In many ways, the side content of this game feels like.. Bloodborne's computer generated Chalice Dungeons, which were a completely optional side feature of the game that could be safely ignored and left aside. Except that this time, From removed much of the content you'd find on the normal game path, and threw it all around those new chalice dungeons. Cool weapons, unique talismans, the game lore.. if you don't do this mind numbing copy pasted content you're only getting half a game.
I know, with all the accolades this game received from the gaming press, and the sales it achieved, earning itself a large part of a new audience that never played souls games, I just know, we're never going to see a traditional game by From software anymore, and I'm sad. I don't want more open world drudgery. The world didn't need another developer to fall into this trap.
Elden Ring doesn't have the quest compass, the quest log and other "easy mode" features of a game like skyrim. But it does have the copy pasted ultra linear dungeons that you complete in 5 minutes, it does have the repeated dragon fights that are all the same except one does a breath attack with blue colors and another does flamey breath attacks. It does have the formulaic world structure - each part of the map must contain X number of objectives to do.
In Elden Ring, these are : each "square" of the map has 1 catacomb, 1 or multiple caves, tunnels, "hero tomb" with a chariot that instantly kills whatever it runs over, 1 dragon to kill, 1 Erdtree avatar or putrid tree spirit, 1 church with an upgrade for your flask, 1 tower with a ridiculously simple """puzzle""" (but often time consuming, like find three hidden turtles to kill on the island to open it), 1 evergaol with a boss you fight in an open arena...
How, exactly, is this game a breakthrough going against the grain of open world design? It doesn't go against the grain, it followed the formula to a T. Lacking the UI of mainstream games doesn't mean the world isn't designed like a Bethesda or Ubisoft game.
The only thing that is unique to Elden Ring, is the parts that was already done by every other From games. The open world of ER, though, is nothing new, nothing grounds breaking and its main purpose is to inflate the amount of playtime. I understand de gustibus and all that... but, unanimous 10/10 in the gaming press? Is that all it took? If I was a game developer at Bethesda or Ubisoft, I would be very angry with the state of the gaming press.