As of last night, I'm officially an Elden Lord and it was okay. I spent 150hrs in the game, made it around 145 levels and came away feeling pretty close to how I did when I started: It's a technically impressive dodge-roll monster killing experience that never lets you forget that you're just playing a video game. I ran about half my levels as a melee, either sword 'n board or two-handing some giant pile of metal and the other half as a caster, pew-pewing guys and chargin' muh laz0rz at the bosses so I felt like I got a pretty good span of experience.
As noted, it's technically well done. The visuals are outstanding in terms of both fidelity and design and there's lots of things to say "Cool!" at. Mechanically, it usually worked well and, if you're into the Souls combat thing, this sure gives you a lot of it and it usually felt responsive. The sheer size of the world was impressive in all dimensions. I'd be curious to know the total vertical feet the game spans versus the horizontal breadth of the map.
For all that, it never really bonded me to the world. The world feels like endless set-pieces designed to make you say "Neat" rather than a living place. Really, the whole world is a shit show and you're never given the impression that it'll be better once you're Elden Lord, it's just a thing you're doing. I only had interest in a couple NPCs -- which is good because almost all NPCs fare poorly in the game. The quest lines largely felt like "Well, that's a thing I did, I guess". Even the main story conclusion felt anticlimatic. There were several mechanical annoyances: the UI is overall pretty terrible, enemies striking through walls, etc but mainly I just ended it feeling like "So that's a game I played. Boy, some of those bosses sure did suck." I'll probably dink around through a few more sessions, cleaning up bosses I skipped or preparing for a NG+ I'll probably never really get into, then move on.
The game will almost certainly win all the GOTYs and it probably deserves it. It's great at its core function of battling lots of dudes, big and small, and making visually impressive scenes but felt fairly hollow to me beyond that. If I was more into the controller mechanics of battling dudes (I never did experience that omg adrenaline after finally beating that guy rush) I'd probably spend a bajillion hours in it but I'm not.
