Elden Ring being the most welcoming Soulsborne game is a very relative term

I have seen chat about Elden Ring being the most accessible (as in, welcoming to newcomers and easy to pick up) game yet of the collected FromSoft oeuvre. I haven't played nearly as much Elden Ring as Ed or our guides team, but I do feel this statement, while not an exact a lie, definitely needs a lot more qualification than people are giving it.

In relative terms, one would say that a bowl of hot sick was more enjoyable than eating a bowl of cold sick, for example. Elden Ring is, of course, much better than sick at any temperature, obviously - I'm just saying that so far, I have not found it to be much easier or less opaque than any other FromSoft game, except it has clearer tooltips and sometimes an NPC will say, "You should do this thing." In fact, the open world - the thing that people say is the most good bit - is having the opposite effect on me.