Most of the people praising it I think would've probably played Morrowind though. At least, they're part of the youtube gaming crowd that would've likely touched on the classics. I myself have never played Morrowind and I'm not really flabberghasted by Elden Ring all the same.
I think what Elden Ring does do better than most open-worlds is keep the player's focus on the world itself rather than on icons. While I will say something like Horizon: Forbidden West has just a bit too much bloat, a more present issue is that your attention is diverted to the map and HUD making the actual gameworld often feel secondary. Ghost of Tsushima tried to alleviate this by making the wind guide you instead of an arrow or marker, but this resulted in kinda the same issue of you just looking at the wind the whole time. Elden Ring doesn't have anything like that apart from a very unintrusive compass, and it really helps the world to take complete centre stage. But the flipside to that is that there's really nothing much concrete to discover in this world other than more enemies.
Horizon: Forbidden West did piss me off with a bunch of bullshit (nothing that really had much to do with its open-world but still), yet I did play it for the better part of three weeks. It's also had some sequences that were really quite memorable. Elden Ring I picked up less than a week ago and I can already feel the monotony set in, since there's just very little to do in this world both mechanically and narratively.
While I think Elden Ring has more artistic merrit than most open-world games, including Horizon: Forbidden West, this does not feel like the next step for open-world games. Both Breath of the Wild and The Witcher 3 feel like better examples of that, but than I'm sure this just comes down to personal taste.
That's fair, although I still honestly blame at very least a short memory for the implication by some that Elden Ring is groundbreaking. That, or maybe gaming is starting to experience the same cycle of new/retro that film and fashion follow, where stuff is just gonna be in vouge for a while and then a blast from the past is considered a welcome change. I think you're right that a big part of the HUD being how it is has to do with showcasing the world and design just on the basis that most elements disappear if you aren't in combat or cycling through your D-pad menu, so it might be more of an artistic choice rather than a UI choice.
Though FROM(or ever any dev) has to know that any secrets in the game aren't going to stay secret any longer once someone with an internet connection discovers them and people are going to use the net to help each other. On the subreddit, there's a lot of discussion on the subreddit about if Summons(spirit ashes) are broken/etc and whether using them is how the devs intended you to play....which again, the internet exists, FROM knows it exists, and knows any OP builds and weapons and summons are gonna become known pretty much instantly to the wider public and it would be stupid to assume they don't know people are gonna be exploiting stuff like the mimic tear.
For all the complaints about stuff like the mimic tear, I think this is reddit kind of acting like a hivemind rather than a group of individuals again. Is the mimic tear super OP? Yes, if you use one of a few builds that reddit really likes. If you use a build like mine, which is not optimal but is good enough for me to proceed through the game perfectly acceptably, the poor little guy is basically useless. Any strategy beyond "hit it really hard and tank" or "spam a lot of magic shit/status effects" doesn't really work because it has at best one of the dumber NPC Invader AIs (probably intentionally to keep it from being unstoppable) and will run in and get flattened instantly if you depend on any sort of nuanced tactic. In my case I made a sort of melee glass cannon. It works. It also dies in a couple hits to most bosses, so I gotta move a lot and heal a lot. This is fine for me and I don't think its particularly better or worse than any other kind of non-optimal build, particularly parry or strength/faith builds probably work the same as mine, but it can't work with the mimic. My fight with the mimic was pathetic, because it didn't know it needed to start running when I started swinging. One shot the poor guy. I'm not surprised that some of this stuff was adjusted in a patch I think last night, but the adjustments don't appear to make the strategies useless, just somewhat less effective so they won't become the "only way to play" type of meta that is horrible for high content games like this.
To your point, I agree, there's no way From didn't intend this stuff. They might tweak it up or down as they try to adjust for player optimization, but its just a bit too clean for it to be unintentional and I wonder if this was a bone thrown to people for the purposes of streamlining their second playthrough. No need to bumble through the game a second time, the joy of discovery only really works once so instead there are a few straightforward ways to quickly level you up, set you up with a decent weapon, and send you on your way. You'll find an even more blatant set up later in the game - there is a location that cannot possibly be interpreted as anything other than a late-game speed levelling location. There is no way it was intended as anything else just based on how the area and enemies work and where the grace is located - if you see videos about "farming millions of runes in only a couple hours!!!" this is what I'm talking about. The videos set it up as this crazy discovery, but honestly you don't have to do anything special to get to this point, you will find it totally organically while playing the game and exploring. Its not hidden or secret at all, with the most difficult part about finding it being that its located in a fairly dangerous area and the area is optional, but its optional in the way that bothering with the basement of Stormveil or more than 50% of Caelid is optional - you don't NEED to go there, but you would be choosing to skip hours of directed game content by not engaging with it.
