Game of the year for me!

So, the game in my opinion is fantastic and I do not regret buying it, but it does have some severe flaws which the community defends with their lives.

I'm not great at writing reviews so forgive me.

Pro
Large world
Open world
Ran flawlessly on my system at 4k, though I have a 4090 and 13900k so that's not saying much
Weapon selection
Multiple combat styles
Great characters
Beautiful scenery and graphical models
Sense of progression
Multiple endings

Cons
Endings were basically the same and very short, very underwhelming after 100 or so hours of gameplay.

The inventory system is the worst I have seen in a long time, very difficult to compare item statistics. Despite their insistence on weight being a major part of the mechanics you seem to be able to carry every weapon and armour i the game on your person. I actually didn't realise having "heavy weight" was severely limiting my dodge mechanic until 10 hours in at which point the game became significantly easier.

I found the consumables in the game generally useless. I ended up using a small lantern for dark areas and health potions. The other items I just hoarded without feeling the need to use them.

I listed weapon and armour selection as a pro but I found that I didn't really use them. My starter armor (vanguard) and an early game sword carried me through the entire game. Differences between the armour seemed mostly aesthetic.
I didn't really feel I had the opportunity to play with other styles of combat due to heavily investing in my current style of gameplay. Yes you get the option to respec later in the game but by that point I was comfortable and didn't want to suddenly change to a spell caster from melee combat despite the ridiculous amount of spells I was obtaining.

No journal or list of completed objectives. Some people can't be glued to the game day after day, there is no excuse for this missing ui element especially due to the very poor quest line progression, and to have it is not "hand holding".

Little to no guidance on npc questlines, despite what people say on the forums. You can accidentally find an NPC in a random location, get perhaps a hint off them of a quest line and if you are lucky you will encounter the next part of the quest but then not realise its a part of a quest! These quests may only be completed in some scenarios once you have discovered 90% of the game by which time you may have even forgotten the interaction with the npc at the start of the game.
You can inadvertently lock yourself out of certain quest progression, miss it completely or with lack of guidance break the quest or fail it instantly. I will give you one example which may be a slight spoiler but it demonstrates the point well. There is a non human npc that wishes to become human, the npc attains this goal and when you chance upon this npc and try to interact with them you get three dots "...", restart next to this npc and they will be dead. I looked this up online and it turns out you have to get a random item from a specific set of circumstances which you must activate next to the npc to prevent this. Completely random with no guidance. There is also another major npc at the start of the game you can miss because the only way to find them is to perform an in game emote (which you first have to obtain) at a certain location.
Then there is the fact I almost completely missed a major section of the game. The Monkey Lane is a separate area which is optional, to get to this area you must use a medallion at a certain location which is also used with another medallion to progress the main questline. It is not obvious at all that you must use your d-pad to switch medallions to get to the optional area. I even think I missed this as I didn't have the Monkey Lane medallion complete at this point and location became useless after you discover the next bonfire. Again I only discovered this as I approached the last boss of the game and was confused about not encountering certain bosses. A game SHOULD NOT require you to look up questlines online, even if the community defends it by saying "you should be more observant", "you should keep a notepad and write things down", what ridiculous statements.

The start of the game is incredibly difficult (I don't mind this, I actually enjoy it), but once you start levelling and getting used to common enemy animations the game becomes progressively easier to the point of tedium, with the exception of bosses which are compensated with much larger health pools or difficult to dodge AOE attacks.

I didn't really dabble in much versus. I tried it a couple of times as I was forced to from single player content but I ended up being almost 1 shot everytime so I'm not sure what's going on there. That experience put me off exploring that aspect of the game completely.

I wish there were some npcs I could enjoy consistently interacting with or keeping the company of. There are a couple of npcs I liked but interaction felt shallow. End game none of the npcs really mattered with the exception of your agent or if you were going with a specific ending.