I wanna add something else to the problems of the open world thing. Now this isn't really the fault of the game but more of an issue that becomes the bi-product of the way i feel like the average player tackles open world games.
I think its safe to say and a lot of people have sunk a lot of hours into Limgrave (the first map zone of the game) a zone that can almost be an entire game by itself. And people are exploring the shit out of it, myself included. But what happens after that. If the average person is anything like me, then the game starts to overstay it's welcome. To the point where I step into a new zone, look at the map, and go, "Oh fuck I gotta run around all this now." And fatigue wears in and I personally start to rush towards the endgame to see the credits roll.
It's a problem in general I think with open world in which they are exciting and fun to explore at first, but unless the content within the world is engaging at frequent, players eventually start to skip.
A critque channel on Youtube named Luke Stevens spoke about open world design and the rate of engagement players must encounter while they explore. He analysed two open world games The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey (which was the latest game at the time). And he explained that in order for an open world to hold a player's interest that player must come across SOMETHING every 60 seconds. It doesn't matter what this something is, could be a puzzle, a dungeon, a boss, random npc event, whatever. Basically if you hold a direction and run in a straight line for 60 seconds you should encounter something interesting.
Elden Ring fails this test. While you certainly might find a roaming animal, or generic enemy, within that 60 seconds, these are not engagiing things themselves. You should find ruins, dungeons, caves, bosses, items or something of note that is different the the rest of the scenery around you. Generic enemies are part of the rest of the scenary around you and therefore, imo, do not count. Especially when generic enemies stop becoming interesting very quickly due to their lack of reward and extreme danger to fight. Hell I think normal monster gangbangs have killed me more than bosses in the game so far. That and falling.
It's sad to me because I do think that Elden Ring is the best game that Fromsoft has made to date. But it's held back by a extremely oversized open-world that just didn't need to be this massive. If you cut back the world by 35% then i think ER would be a 10/10. For me the extreme downtime and lack of direction (outside of directly main story direction) brings it down to an 8/10 imo. I spend so much time fucking bored trying to find something to do or collect that it ruins the moments when I'm actually fighting a boss or getting a new item.