This is how I feel about Elden Ring. I just picked it up, and while the quality of life improvements for the soulsborne games is big (wow, a dedicated jump button!?), the open world with crafting just seems to dilute the overall experience. Not as much as I expected it to, but it just isn't as tight as the rest of them.
Okay, so the Soulsbourne games do have open worlds, but they're not made arbitrarily larger so they can give you a mount to traverse the miles of empty space made for no other reason than to be bigger.