Buddy, I just wanna vibe with the atmosphere and the scenery sometimes instead of studying the blade or whatever the fuck. It's a video game, relax.

I think this might be the disconnect. If you just vibed with the scenary there isn't much to the games. You could run through the whole game in a few hours. I think Elden Ring only has four or five required boss fights and afaik every other fight is optional and you could run past all the enemies if you want to.

Much of the game - story, characters, and lore - only comes out if you spend a lot of time getting your ass kicked. Most of the game's background comes from random item drops you'd most likely miss if you got through every fight on the first try. There's a lot of information tied up in how enemies fight - similar enemies from different factions have subtly different equipment and weild different spells. Spell mechanics tie in to story stuff.

The other thing is - it's not easy to make the game easier. Most of the fighting relies on learning enemy movesets and timing. If you make the enemies deal %5 of their normal damage you're still not going to win if you can't figure out when you have openings to land hits. You'll end up being knocked down, staggered, afflicted with statuses, and all the rest of it. You could slow down the attack animations, but they'd look goofy af and become even harder to read.

As much as people scoff these games are carefully crafted works of art. There is wiggle room to make them "easier", but only so much due to the nature of the gameplay.

Additionally, the Elden Ring does have many mechanics - coop especially, to make it much more approachable to players who have struggled with previous entries in the series. I rarely seem people who complain about people who complain about the difficulty of the game discuss or engage with these systems.

Finally, i think there's a serious disconnect in the nature of the dark souls gameplay loop. You're supposed to die a whole lot. Every time you fight thrugh an area you have a chance for drops, you gain xp, and if you're paying attention you're figuring out the best path through the area in hopes of getting further next time. That process - advancing, learning, getting xp, dying, and repeating, is the core gameplay loop. If you don't enjoy that you likely won't have fun with the game.

I think a great deal of bad faith has accumulated - many people complaining about "git gud" don't seem to actually be interested in the game, only using it as a whipping boy for complaints about games gatekeeping difficulty. But dark souls and elden ring are generally the only games in the vast sea of available games discussed in this manner. It's these particular games that are essentially their own niche genre that peopke continue to be mad about over a decade after Dark Souls, despite each subsequent game having more features to make the games accessible to more people.