I see why you’d say they’re still experimenting - and they are within the confines of the souls formula. They definitely aren’t making carbon copies of past games. But, compared to the crazy variety and wild mechanics in their back catalog, the souls formula is pretty narrow. They’ve got a card battler, an adventure game series, a co-op puzzle platformer, and more in their portfolio. Demon’s Souls itself was a huge experiment: souls, messages, and invasions into a mostly single player experience were completely novel and even weird. Let’s not forget about world tendency, (even if we want to).

FromSoft was always like that: a bunch of totally random ideas you’d never seen before with enough good, bad, and weird to go around. The changes they make today are comparatively tame. Imagine if the next soulslike game did away with the entire magic system and instead you craft your own spells from elements (Eternal Ring). Or if they did away with respawns and overhauled the entire leveling system in Bloodborne like they did when trying to give Shadow Tower its own identity separate from King’s Field. They were wild, but that’s what gave the world soulslikes in the first place.

I understand why they play it safe. Honestly, they don’t have a choice. It comes with the budget. So I really don’t begrudge them the lack of experimentation too much. But I do find it sad because it’s our loss. They could do better, and who knows what other stuff they might have come up with if they were truly free to experiment the way they used to. What I really wish is for them and other devs to just make smaller games with smaller budgets. Still make the AAA games, just set aside a small amount to experiment with and try new things too. That way we keep learning, discovering, and innovating. We’d all have better games for it.