Uta posted... Kind of mid, honestly. Every single mini dungeon feels like it's either a cave or a crypt. I'm not sure I've found anything aside from those, and they're all laid out in exactly the same way. Caves have a hole in the ground with a series of platforms that are always arranged in the same pattern. Cryptst always have stairs leading down to a door that you turn left at to go through some hallways to find the lever that opens the door. Crypts come in two flavors, little gargoyle guys or skelemans. If you're lucky you might fight skeletons controlled by a necromancer. The caves come in two flavors. Normal cave, and Rot / Poison cave. That one is far rarer though. There's also mineshafts but those are so rare they may as well not exist and the only cool one is the one leading up to the Altus Plateau. Those also have the problem of having elevator shafts which all have the exact same copy and pasted ledges in them. At one point even using the same mine shaft three times in the same dungeon.
The combat is extremely basic compared to a game like Monster Hunter, but it technically has a little bit more going for it than say Breath of the Wild. Though BotW had Runes and a Physics system that were far more fun to engage with than anything this game has offered so far. I'm also not a fan of this games complete lack of scaling features. BotW had a hidden World Level that would cause enemies and items to scale as the player became more experienced. Elden Ring doesn't, so if you're like me and went to Liurnia as the second zone then by the time I found South Limgrave the whole zone was a joke with zero difficulty. In BotW enemy drops also mattered. Link could wield anything, and because my weapons would break I was required to engage with enemies to replenish my stock. Once you were good enough going Lionel Hunting was the best way to get the best weapons, but even that was more thrilling than going through a mini dungeon full of copy and pasted content to get a talisman that has zero impact on my build.
I feel like if I were to try and play Elden Ring again I would end up skipping 90% of the content as it's not relevant to my character build. I'd probably do something like
1 Do Vare's quest line for a grinding spot
2 Go straight for the items I need
3 Do the requisite quest(s) for the ending I want
4 Kill the bare minimum number of bosses needed to finish the game.
In spite of that I'm still having fun with the game. But I don't think I'd ever return to it save for DLC maybe. If this is seriously meant to be the best in the whole soulslike series I doubt I'll be touching any of the others. Especially the Dark Souls style since this game seems to follow that one most closely. Except for the late game bosses that all look ripped from Sekiro without giving players the tools Sekiro had for dealing with them.
Tldr: They really like BotW.