ssjevot posted...
The problem is that for whatever reason most people want an open world experience. If you make something open world it sells better. You probably felt all the best areas were the legacy dungeons that played more like those other games. This is because a linear experience is crafted around providing the player something specific the creators felt would be interesting. Think of it as a guided tour versus just wandering around a place. But beyond that you also run into the weird difficulty balance issues. You can go through the game in any order you want to a degree, but difficulty is scaled around a certain order.
On the other hand there have always been a lot of people who say they want to explore in the Souls games and don't really like bosses and hard combat and those people often found Sekiro the worst (largely bosses with small largely inconsequential exploration sections between them, no way to mitigate difficulty with summons or leveling, etc.). So it might be boring to you if you really enjoyed say Sekiro.
There are some perks to the open world, I liked discovering new places on my own since even small areas can have nice setpieces. I really enjoyed places like Siofra Tunnel and Atlus Plateu over Stormveil. However there's so much dead space in between and copy-pasted catacombs & bosses that feels like a waste of time. I get why ER has more broad appeal and I don't knock that, it just leaves much to be desired and, honestly, boring after a certain point.
To be honest by biggest gripe is I fucking hate poke-and-roll combat with a passion, but at least I got more options on how I poke