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I started playing Elden Ring last week. I'm about 20 hours and 6 bosses in, with Godrick the last one I defeated. It's about as good as I'd heard, feeling essentially like Bloodborne (that and Sekiro being the only other From Soft games I've played - Nioh is the only non-From Soft soulslike I've played) but expanded to open world scale.
I always felt there was a fractal quality to the level design in Bloodborne and Sekiro, with how different forking paths attach to each other to create larger areas that are forked from other larger areas, and I feel like it really shows in the open overworld of Elden Ring. It almost feels like they took one of their Bloodborne levels, scaled it up by a couple orders of magnitude, and then put in other Bloodborne levels into the various castles and temples and fortresses and such that serve as important progression points around the world.
As I play, I find myself simultaneously marveling at how brilliant the level design is for balancing the feelings of open freedom and linear progression and being saddened at how other devs can't seem to do the same. Obviously, good level design takes a lot of work, but also, none of what From Soft does with their levels seems particularly difficult to copy and execute. They keep things feeling more open by constantly throwing forks in the road of players, letting many of them accumulate before any one of those paths hits a dead end. And almost always, one of those paths open up to some whole other area with a fresh new set of forks to choose from. They entice players to explore by placing items in areas that are visible but not accessible, sometimes remaining inaccessible until dozens of hours of progression later. And they do still place enough dead ends - true dead ends with no reward, no new information learned, not even an impressive visual to admire - to keep the levels feeling like a real place. All those forks that led up to such dead ends keep them from being unsatisfying, and the fact that, often enough, you do get rewarded by an entirely new world to explore makes the exploration addicting.
Doing all these well almost definitely takes a ton of work and testing, but devs often don't seem to even make an effort at doing them okay. I feel like, most often, 3rd person action games have levels that are either super linear or just fully wide-open, and when they do make an attempt at this forking-paths style design, they stop at just 2 or 3 iterations instead of letting it really get twisty and labyrinthine like From Soft likes to do.
Also, the bosses I've fought are as good as I've come to expect from From Soft, at least this early in the game. Those are always by far my favorite parts of 3rd person action games like this one. I'm expecting that the difficulty and variety of bosses will ramp up as I get deeper in, though, since Margit, Leonine, Erdtree Avatar, Godrick, and even the Ancient Hero of Zapor all felt like variations of each other to some extent.
I have to stress that it is a fantastic game that I'm nitpicking and that expecting otherwise is stupidly unrealistic, but sadly I believe this to be the biggest problem with the game, that as you keep playing the map/dungeon/level structure and the boss design, that felt so natural at the start, ends up feeling increasingly game-y. But then again, expecting otherwise is insane; a game that large could not have had hundreds of dungeons with the same intricateness as a bespoke-made Souls game, hundreds of bosses with all different movesets, etc...
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