I mean, my first post in the thread encapsulated it as a Good, but struggling to be great game. And speculated that once the initial open-world souls shine falls off, its probably gonna slide down the rankings.
But common concerns are expressed in the reddit and so on. Length has definitely come up. The endgame being very truncated and linear (if you compare the Mountain Top of the Giants zone to for instance, Limgrave, or even the Weeping Peninsula, the drastic drop in amount of content goes. Reused bosses is a massive complaint across the board.
Lack of NPC directions come up a lot too. People noticed almost immediately that Nepheli/Kenneth had a broken quest left in the game, and whie the initial "we're patching it in" was heralded, it was pretty obviously a bandaid fix. Seluvis and Selenns questline being janky has also been noted.
Mechanically. Well they patched Radahns unintended overlapping hitboxes, but there's a still a large dog that hits you 17 times per swing because of a technical screwup (related to it being a reused rig of a small dog, no less). I have never been one to say Souls hitboxes were accurate, as its often laughably untrue and dodge rolling patches over the gaps a lot, but thats a level of weirdly off polish for being their bread and butter. Later bosses one shots and stuff like Mohg's gimmick attack (which requires completing an easily missable questline to counter) also get a lot of flak. As does the tendency of bosses to just have jump backs and warps to get immediately across the arena.
Build disparity is another common gripe. There is so much Intelligence scaled gear by an order of magnitude to Faith, or Arcane. And sorcery is both raw DPS higher by miles, and barely anything resists magic (most things are weak to it), while Fire and Holy are the most resisted items (the final boss is literally healed if you hit it with Holy, so if thats your build hopefully you thought to sideline in one of the fire faith weapons). Bleed is king, out DPSing anything again by an order of magnitude unless its outright immune, just chunking off ~15% of the health bar every 3-5 hits. Madness and Deathblight literally do nothing in PvE, even on targets like invaders when it should.
