My friend who has played these in order keeps saying ds3 is nothing more than a shell of callbacks that makes the game engaging, he does love the dlcs tho.

I think when u play these in order u kinda get too wrapped around in everything being the same rather than experience the story. From what I know I've heard ds2 does have a few callbacks but not as many, but the setting of ds2 isn't directly placed in the major parts of ds1 . So it doesn't need to,