I find dark souls 3 successfully condensed down the mechanics and gameplay of the souls games but delivered nothing in terms of exploration and world building.
The lore is DS2 is very good but the gameplay feels so horrendously unpolished and a lot of enemy placement feels really bad.
If I could play ds2 with ds3 gameplay it would potentially be able to rival the first half of DS1 for me
the enemy placement isn’t exactly amazing in vanilla but it is atrocious in scholar of the first sin. which one did you play?