There’s lots of praise for the connected, looping level design, and I see claims that the lord vessel ruins that… but most of their subsequent games featured easy teleportation, right? Walking around gets old, IMO.
The original Souls game, Demon's Souls also featured easy teleportation. It's kinda like the difference between Morrowind and Oblivion: in one game you're running around everywhere until you get the means to fast travel and in the other you can zip to and from discovered locations from the start of the game.