I watched this and really don't understand Sterling's point. Because Elden Ring doesn't guide the player with map markers that's true, but it also doesn't have any variety to it's content. You will always be going to a place and fighting a thing. Always. Even if there are puzzles, those puzzles usually require you to fight a thing.
Look Ubisoft maps are litered with little things to do or find and there are only a handiful of varying things (climbing puzzles, combat, stealth puzzles, random treasures, whatever) but at least that content is more that 1 thing, and the map is filled with stuff all the time everywhere. Elden Ring's open world is filled with bad guys and nothingness.
I seriously don't know what crack people are smoking but the absence of map markers (at first), does not mean that ER is doing anything differently. If anything it only makes running around the map annoying. The whole time you run around in ER you have this weird paranoia that you missed the best hidden item in the game that you NEED in order to be able to defeat The Bullhole Destroyer, and if you try without that item you'll get your butthole destroyed.
Not to mention a lot of progression critical NPC's are missable and the player would have no idea. I never found the lady that levels your summons up, which means that summons are worthless to me and the game is that much harder because of it. Hell spirit summons in general are technically missable. Every other critical NPC in any previous game has been forced onto the player. You can't miss the doll in Bloodborne, you can't miss the Firekeeper in Dark Souls, you can't miss the Sculpter in Sekiro. If an NPC holds a vital mechanic then it should be missable by the player.
But that is what comes as a cost of Guidance-free game design. You risk the player missing critical things that would make their play-throughs easier, and therefore risk players bouncing off your game.
"Oh you didn't find the obvious super powerful NPC behind the false wall in the random cave 99 miles off any explorable path? Sucks to suck bro." It's bad.
I said this previously, but I don't think an open world of emptiness is any better than a world with too much garbage on the map. If anything it's worse becuase at least with too many things on the map the player has knowledge of what they are skipping versus not skipping. In Elden Ring you are not given that choice, you miss things and you can't do anything (in game) about it fuck you player.
Eldren Ring is going to be the most wiki'ed Souls game ever, because of how unfriendly the open world makes the game. With previous Souls games, players might struggle on bosses but it isn't because they didn't power up enough or didn't find the right magical item to take the boss down with, it's strictly a skill thing. Which is less the case in ER because the game is build around certain mechanics.