so much content being locked behind certain progress milestones

Ehh, sort of? The main story is pretty linear but progress is very open ended, which you can say for almost every open world game, even minecraft.

You have no lasting impact on the game world.

Events you put into motion literally change geography(IE, killing radahn turns an entire area into a smoking crater.) Individual quest lines have varying levels of effect on the world ranging from affecting enemy spawns to changing the leadership of an entire region.

but honestly if you entered each area directly from the roundtable hold would the experience have been materially different?

Yes, because something that happens in elden ring is that you start with the world map being really small, and then you keep uncovering new areas, making the map bigger, but you have no idea until you actually explore and are hit with how expansive an area that’s just hiding behind a bridge is.

In the DLC that feeling is compounded with the pure verticality of the world, a small non-descript cave that you can easily miss without a guide leads you about a quarter of the DLC areas.

The exploration, and the feeling when you uncover a new area, wouldn’t exist if you could just warp there from a hub.

I think elden ring probably couldn’t be told in a smaller scale level design.

You hear about massive spanning battlefields, wars with gods, etc. Could not be correctly portrayed with a more compact level design. And the vistas are gorgeous.

Open worlds benefit the game when exploration is the point.

Mornings have their own golden rule:

Thou shall be sidetracked by random bullshit every goddamned time.

Musk flopping onto the table like a dying fish desperately trying to lick the crumbs off other children’s plates despite the fact that he hasn’t even touched his own pie yet.

What’s annoying about religious people discussing atheism(which happens every time it’s brought up) is that they invariably assume atheists also have religious thinking. Like I must go to atheist church every Sunday to convince myself there’s no god. It betrays either a lack of empathy or a lack of honesty.

Nah, I tended my garden, had some coffee, and going to have some tacos later. I only think about religion when it’s brought up, usually when I see a billboard telling me my life is worthless and magic daddy is gonna have me for barbeque after I die.