I've recently picked up Elden Ring, having only played a good chunk of Dark Souls 1 in the past. Some potential spoilers will follow.
I'm enjoying aspects of the open world design, it's refreshing to see a map that isn't littered with icons, but that doesn't stop the open world from falling into the trappings of having predictable "types of content". As an example, if I find a cave with a dungeon, I can pretty much expect that there will be a locked door that I need to unlock by pulling some lever in the level, after which I will fight a boss. And there will be traps and enemies ambushing you along the way. Similarly with Evergaols etc. Maybe this changes in the later areas, as I'm only 30 hours in, but the fact is that there have been a few patterns already emerging, which of course goes against that sense of discovery that the game seems to want to achieve. The first time you discover a new "type of content" is pretty cool though, so they nailed that aspect. And of course entering a new section of the open world - of which there seem to be many - for the first time also has that effect, but knowing it's filled with those same types of activities, even if the enemies are new, does somewhat lessen the sense of wonder.
I won't comment on the questing, characters and story - this is not what the game is about and needless to say that aspect is very bare-bones (always has been in From Software games).
The combat... I never really enjoyed combat in these games, as it essentially boils down to pattern recognition, which I don't find engaging. It's why I never finished Dark Souls 1. Even The Witcher series dabbled in this in TW2 and 3, but they still had their own spin on it, having combat that was somewhere in between Dark Souls and Batman. Elden Ring kind of goes that way too in the open world, where you're often fighting larger groups of enemies and it's more about positioning and how you approach the encounter tactically, rather than the more typical 1v1 or 1v2 fights that you are required to approach in a certain way by learning the enemy pattern, which you see in the more tightly-designed dungeons. I just never enjoyed stretching out 1 hour of content over 2-3 hours by way of doing things over and over again until you learn the patterns to near-perfection.
Other than that, the combat is tight and feels responsive, although the camera does tend to spaz out in tight corners when you're locked-on. One thing I don't like is that you don't seem to be able to cancel out of attacks (or if there is a way, I haven't found it). I understand this is to prevent button-mashing and to enforce the pattern-recoginition style combat, but it doesn't feel right when you tap attack because you think you'll have an opening only to immediately realise that opening won't be there and press dodge to no effect. I feel like some early attack-cancelling should be allowed to make combat feel more responsive, especially when you're punished so severely for getting it wrong. I will still have learned something new about the pattern, but I now don't need to restart the entire fight/section.
So, open world combat/explorationis fun, but I'm still not really finding joy in the big Dark Souls-esque areas. The good thing is that because the game is open world, I have the freedom to just go explore areas where the combat is enjoyable until my character has progressed enough to be able to make the dungeon-crawling bearable, where a section takes 2-3 tries rather than 5-10.
I feel simiarly about boss fights - it's just an exercise in pattern recognition. Fight the boss enough times until you find an opening in their pattern that works for you, then execute that until the boss dies. Again, leveling helps a lot here, becuase you don't need to learn that pattern to perfection before you move on, as you're able to do/take more damage the stronger the character gets.
So, essentially, I'm finding the exploration interesting enough to keep playing, and that same exploration helps make the parts I don't enjoy as much tolerable. I like the effort they've put into making exploration elicit that sense of discovery, but I think there's more that can still be done there, as there are still easily-recognisable patterns to the open world activities that diminish that sense of wonder the longer you play. I suppose the answer to that is to follow no templates for the open world activities, but that would of course take a lot of time and effort. Perhaps subverting those player expectations from time to time, then, would be the answer. Maybe Elden Ring will do this - I guess I'll find out as I keep playing. The Witcher 3 did this with its contracts and side-quests, by sometimes breaking the established template (e.g. House of Reardon, Phantom of Eldberg, Beast of Honorton etc.), which kept questing/exploration feeling fresh.
On the controls - I am using mouse and keyboard and I think the game controls fine. I only ever use a gamepad for racing games, where being able to turn the wheel at just the right angle is important. I don't find that this is the case in Elden Ring - being able to dodge in 8 directions is enough for me. It would be nice if mouse and keyboard actually worked well in the menus though. Sometimes pressing Esc takes you back from your current menu to the previous one, sometimes it does nothing, even though the controller mapping seems to be the same. It's really poorly done and it's not something that is excusable, in my opinion. If you're going to port your game to PC, you must offer adequate support for mouse and keyboard, where at least navigating the UI doesn't feel like some arcane art. What I've found to work ok as a compromise is that right-clicking in the UI brings up a pop-up with all the actions that can be performed on that screen, so you can click on the Back button, for example, as opposed to trying to figure out what key it's mapped to.
