Open World Dark Souls?

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When From Software started teasing Dark Souls, they told people that it would be like an open world Demon's Souls. While Dark Soul's world was more open than in Demon's Souls (which used a hub world that functioned almost like a Mega Man stage select), it wasn't "open" in the same sense that Skyrim or Fallout are. Not that that's a bad thing, but here lately I've been wondering: how well do you think Dark Souls would work with a 100% open, fully explorable, gigantic map?

Personally, while I'd definitely give it a chance, I doubt it'd go over very well. With a game as difficult as Dark Souls, you practically depend on the linear and predictability of the level design so that you can memorize enemy placement, save points, traps and shortcuts, etc. Make it open world, where literally anything could be anywhere at any time, and you lose that predictability. My opinion is the game would be nearly impossible to beat if that were the case.

Well Dark Souls does give you choices of where to go, and especially the first one all of the corridors intersect each other to make one connected open world that can be an open maze, and not to mention if you have been able to see a speed run of the game and how the world can actually be traversed more freely than you may think.

As for Dark Souls or a game difficult like Dark Souls being more "open" as akin to Skyrim and Fallout, I think that it may be possible. And I think it goes back to how people have noticed that strangely Dark Souls fits a philosophy of a classic game which would be The Legend of Zelda, which existed to a time in games referred to as Nintendo hard, and in being pretty hard it had its dungeons hidden throughout the large open world which could be done in any order. A number of people are of the opinion that Dark Souls is kind of like if the first Zelda game was made in modern time, although kind of on that point was that I was hearing that before Breath of the Wild came out, which am more strongly of the idea that it is the original game but modern. Breath of the Wild can actually be pretty difficult that you may die pretty easy from things, but you also get a huge amount of freedom where you can go to places way too hard very early on, maybe even towards the final boss without doing the other dungeons. I would not say that it is quite as hard as Dark Souls, it is a step in the direction and is very open. So again I do think it is possible.

I was going to say something similar. I only played Dark Souls for a few hours, but the gameplay felt very much like Zelda to me, so I imagine an open-world version would be very similar to BotW.

BotW does feel almost too open, though. Once you get to the point where you don't want or need to kill monsters to farm parts from them, it's much easier to just avoid battles and go around, especially if you have a good disguise.

The combat on its own isn't what's compelling about the game, it's the varied environments and encounter design, and the tension of moving forwards while staying aware. Beyond that, I think Souls games are very good at respecting your time, and open worlds typically aren't.

More interconnectivity is fine though. Dark Souls 3 did a poor job with that; it felt like an A-to-B journey, just with a couple of divergences. Bloodborne (the best Souls game, obviously) does it really well, with each location in the game being relatively close to others and offering multiple routes and hidden routes. You get a better sense of the geography and cool stuff like taking the tunnel from the woods into the graveyard in Yarnham. Old Yarnham has a neat shortcut that allows you to run straight to you-know-who and kill him in seconds. Yarnham in general feels so much like a real place because of all the different paths you can take, and the amount of time you spend exploring it all, and a good deal of it can even be skipped on subsequent playthroughs. All of that without compromising on the encounter design.