The verticality is absolutely the best part. My biggest gripe with Elden Rings world is that it's an "open world" game in kind of the same way Ubi games are. Traversal is largely trivial, so you stop paying attention to the map after you've reached major areas.

In my opinion, Dark Souls I is also an open world game, but instead of a 2D map all the zones are tangled up together in a confusing but interesting web.

Shadow of the Erdtree brought some of that back by having zones stacked on top of each other to a much heavier degree than the base game, while also segmenting off geographically close regions.

I wanted to be a level designer for a lot of years, so this is admittedly a bit of a soft spot for me, but I absolutely loved having the game world come at you as as a challenge, almost a character to be fought and bested, outside the legacy dungeons.