I'm towards the end of elden ring now, doing other things before I go and do what u presume is the end or at least very near.
First thing to say is the game just doesn't stop surprising me with how big it is, some obscure entrance leads to a giant sprawling area with sub areas off of that and the vast majority will miss it completely. This doesn't just happen once, it's repeatedly happening to me and I've nowhere near fully explored. I'm currently avoiding any spoilers on the Internet, it's much more enjoyable finding thiggs on your own, but I suspect when I look online before I finish the game for places I may have missed I'll likely find even more. Reminds me of dark souls 1 a lot in that respect only back then there wasn't spoilers everywhere and finding areas felt even more exclusive.
I have had this problem since the very beginning, I'm not hearing many people say the same so maybe I inadvertently build a boss slaying monster but I'm smashing bosses nearly always first go and struggling much more on common enemies. Other than having to farm about 15-20 levels for into stats I'm not using to do radahn, the only boss in the game I had trouble with, I haven't farmed levels so I'm not especially overlevelled and I'm still get 1 combo killed by a lot of enemies despite putting a lot of points into my health but I can just waltz into any boss fight and its over within a minute, even the supposed hardest bosses in the game have been an absolute breeze and sadly it's really trivialised the latter 3rd of the game for me. All I've got is an early game katana, early game ashes and the mimic summons and it just wrecks everything.
There's also a heavy over reliance on ultra aggressive enemies to provide the challenge, most of them just do not relent, you either have to kill them quickly and flawlessly before they even get close or you're just dead, there's no in between most of the time, it's a step down in enemy design from other souls games in my eyes.
I would strongly suggest people don't farm runes and over level no matter how tempting it is, if you're stuck, there's likely an area you haven't visited or missed that's more approachable and you'll naturally level up whilst doing that, i can't imagine how easy the game would be if you're stupidly high level late game and without the challenge, it loses a lot of its appeal.