roughly a month after the game came out someone on r/eldenring posted a thread titled something like "what do you not like about the game?" I made a comment saying kinda the same thing as you: I thought making it open world was a mistake because now there are just large areas filled with nothing particularly interesting, tons of duplicate enemies (and bosses!) and due to the nature of its open world it's super easy to miss important NPCs, sometimes permanently because you unknowingly triggered something on the other side of the map. The last time I checked my comment had like over 70 downvotes with a ton of people replying with some variation of the extremely tired "git gud" (even though I've beaten literally every other souls game solo; Fromsoft fans who base their personality around "I good at hard game" are some of the most insufferable people in this hobby).

The parts of the game I really liked were the legacy dungeons. I thought to myself "I wish this game was just entirely legacy dungeons instead of this open world stuff" and after a while I realized I was just describing their older games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Sekiro.

Idk what point I'm even trying to make here other than you are not alone in being a bit disappointed in the game. I still don't understand all the "this is the best game From has ever made" praise because I think their older games, while not having as much content, easily outclass it in focused design. I hope their next project isn't open world but seeing as how they just announced the game sold over 25 million copies I'm guessing it probably will be 😑. Also I just realized this thread is 10 days old but I'm gonna post this anyway