Okay so Elden Ring is clearly massively flawed:

- PC port is bolloxed as usual with inadequate key rebinds, and very clunky menus.

- Mouse movement is also bolloxed, being cripplingly slow on highest settings, then if this is overcome in Window's settings, the horse riding is nauseatingly jerky and bow-aiming is near-impossible.

- The game runs really slowly, partly because the graphics scalability is woeful (i.e. still looks amazing on lowest settings, and could have been scaled down further).

- "Invisible monster" bug took months to be fixed.

- The lore and story is even more utter gobbledegook and before, managing to simultaneously be tediously generic and off-puttingly incomprehensible. It's like FromSoft put "generic epic fantasy cliches" into an AI text simulator, then translated it to Japanese and back to English using Google translate.

- The copy'n'paste dungeons and re-used monsters / bosses are blatantly lazy filler design.

- The open world can be a bit dull and tedious with too much empty wandering and lack of design.

- The aesthetics and splendour sometimes rely too much on BIG for the sake of BIG and overwhelm the viewer by size rather than purpose.

- The general aesthetics of the open world areas are a bit bland / chromatically jarring with the endless rocks and trees being a bit tiresome.

- As usual some of the progression / exploration can be just as obscure as the lore with quests / areas requiring specific actions that are easy to miss / bugger up, and/or outright obscure secret-hunting.

- The monster design is quite variable in quality from mundane (endless zombies and oversized real world critters) to OTT and bonkers (without logic to the combination).

- In short it's a weird mish-mash of open world, tight but basic dungeons, and more conventional souls-like interconnected maps, almost certain to annoy both open-world RPG players who will get frustrated with the bosses / difficulty / FromSoft obscurity, AND traditional Soulsborne players who will get fed up with some bland emptiness and endless wandering around picking flowers and mushrooms.

... 

Okay so a few minor things I like:

+ quality-of-life tweaks are great: no stamina use outside of combat, open world mobs refill health flasks, all merchants buy almost all stuff so all collecting has value.

+ accessibility tweaks are great: almost all bosses are optional, bonfire spacing much closer, bonfires / stakes closer to bosses, coop / spirit ashes for all bosses, easy to explore / grind / level up

+ combat seems to give the player lots of valid options depending on playstyle preferences, with added bonus of spirit ashes and ashes of war

+ amount of exploration is as good as any open world RPG, plus loot selling makes it generally worthwhile

+ as usual some of the monsters are completely bonkers and very cool

+ the larger legacy dungeons are great in classic Soulslike style

+ the underground world is also great and atmospheric and almost an entire game in itself

+ the ambient music is really nice (i've unusually turned it back up from 20% that I usually set game music to)

+ occasional combats between other groups of enemies is a cool touch

+ the scenery and backdrops and vistas of the world as shockingly, anal-wart-poppingly, stunning in many and various ways. I've actually been laughing out loud about how ridiculously spectacular it looks in some areas.

+ the changing of the weather, day/night, and related ambience is a great touch.

+ the whole vibe of the world is a bit darker, a bit creepier, a bit WTF-ier than the open world average which provides a strong and gripping atmosphere

+ in short, I'm 140 hours in and I don't want to leave it


...


It's a direct mixture of a Souls game with an open world RPG game, and everything that entails (very open-ended, lots of exploration, sometimes little interconnectivity, fast-movement option to compensate for size, plenty of crafting and resource-gathering options, the ability to avoid a lot of bosses, etc etc). It is exactly Dark Skyrim, or Elden Scrolls, and in that context... It's not the best Souls game around. It's not the best open world RPG around. It IS by far the best Open World Soulslike (released this spring).