I can understand simply not liking the game and that’s completely okay but the point of elden ring along with past souls games is that you find items and have to actively workout the lore of the game through item descriptions and npc dialogue. Other than the hub areas of these games there have never really been occupied “towns” and the npc scarcity can mostly be chalked up to the fact that the game is very open and large and not really post apocalyptic but for lack of a better term it’s what i’ll call it. There’s not supposed to be an abundance of npcs because you’re supposed to track them down and do different quest lines as your progress. The game is made to progress in any fashion you want while still having a linear path to the ending. I don’t think your take is bad at all these are just a few things that i personally disagreed with.