Out of all of them, I still think DS1 is my favorite. The connected world design is just something special.
Started a new character recently with the goal of "How much of the world can I explore, how many items can I get / level up, without beating a single boss". This is without any glitches or out of bounds skips.
Ok, I had to beat the tutorial boss the get out of the asylum, but after that, with the master key, it is crazy how much of the world is available to you.
That amount of freedom really made me feel like I was exploring on my first run, and trying to calculate the risk/reward of continuing in a certain direction with difficult enemies/hazards just reinforced that feeling.
In my opinion, that's what open world exploration is really about: treacherous areas, balancing the risk/reward of moving forward, and trying to survive. It beats a big open world that only challenges you with travel time.
I do hope someone makes a good Souls ripoff that focuses more on slow tense exploration of hostile areas with sparse checkpoints but clever shortcuts, and bosses that have interesting gimmicks rather than pattern memorisation.
Maybe I should give it a look. I like the sound of some of that, tho it's not that I want the game to be easy necessarily. I just liked the difficulty being more on getting to the boss than memorising his specific twitches that told me when to mash circle like it's a rhythm game. Would love a game that was between Demon's and Dark 1, with large stretches between checkpoints but lots of shortcuts, and with slow regenerating magic so it is as viable as melee.