Games

You bring up some good points. And I'm about to veer off into "personal opinion" territory, so take this for what it's worth.

But when I think about "running past enemies" in Dark Souls, I think about the tightly designed levels, and how I had to learn the layout before running by was a viable option. And if I wanted to explore an area, I would have to be cautious and alert. Compare that to Elden Ring's open design, and I never felt like I had to "learn the map" nor be wary of my surroundings, I could just kind of run around without consequence and only deal with enemies when I wanted to on my terms.

And I'm sure you could come up with exceptions to these generalizations for each game, but they would be exceptions. On the whole, it's a stark difference in "game feel". And for me personally, taking the fear and need for caution out of exploration was a large deviation from what made a Souls game feel like a Souls game. Not that it is necessarily worse mind you, just different, and shifts the formula to be something quite different. Elden Ring made me feel like I was playing something closer to an Ubisoft open world or even Breath of the Wild a little bit (obvious differences aside, just the "vibe" I got). A really good Ubisoft open world designed by far better developers mind you, but that kind of design philosophy.

And as far as the "go fuck off and farm souls", I could definitely see how ER was a more fun game for that. If you were really in the mood to "grind some Elden Ring", having all that content would definitely be a huge benefit. I'm just not the target audience for it however, as I felt like the repetition of bosses and enemies just to fill the world with mini-dungeons and add content was largely "filler". I'm not much of a fan of grinding to be honest.

This may largely come down to the evolution of my tastes as time has gone on, as I used to have a much more positive opinion on this type of design. For example, when I first played Fallout 2 I thought it was a huge improvement due to the massive dungeons you could find in random encounters, giving me days of content to play around with. Same with Daggerfall, the procedural generated quests and dungeons felt like an endless supply of content. But after replaying them, I couldn't get past the feeling that it was all "filler content" (which sounds more derogatory than I mean it to, I'm just struggling to find the best word choice for this). Same is true for the mini-dungeons and evergoals in ER.

Compare that to DarkSouls, where if I wanted "more content", I would instead just choose to replay the game. And when I do wind up wanting to replay one of these games, I greatly appreciate the larger focus on "hand crafted and finely tuned" content over the "open world buffet" methodology. And when it comes to replaying Elden Ring, I find myself skipping a significant amount of content, and thinking to myself "what if the time they spent creating that repetitive content went into more unique content". Sure, there would be "less content" overall, but there would be "more real content". (Not that Dark Souls was immune to this kind of copy paste content mind you, the Demon Ruins come to mind.)

Anyways, I let that rant get away from me, so thanks for sticking with it if you made it this far. Obviously my personal opinions on the changes Elden Ring made to the Souls formula are not overly common, as it is by far many many peoples favorite of the series. And to be honest, I absolutely loved the game as well, easily one of the best games ever made. My personal critiques are purely my own feelings on a very specific aspect of the series. Different strokes for different folks and all that.